Filed under Uncategorized
The Importance of Bearing Fruit at Work
Too often, we get into a fundamentally unhealthy divide in our thinking about faith and life. We abstract our faith, putting it in the “spiritual” box, and consider our labor as separate. It goes in the “actual real life” box.
I’m thankful for a new book called Fruit at Work: Mixing Christian Virtues with Business (Lanphier, 2012) by Chris Evans. Evans is a talented entrepreneur who works with the cool-sounding Blackstone Entrepreneur Network. He’s also been involved with The Trinity Forum, associated with Os Guinness and others. I’ve enjoyed Fruit at Work, which draws off of Tim Keller and others to ground our daily labor in the gospel and in biblical virtue.
The text is readable and filled with personal reflection from Evans’s life. Here’s an example from his chapter on humility, a quality that not every leader–or Christian leader–has an easy time embodying:
A big way that I changed is that I feel I have a capacity for gentleness that just wasn’t there before I was broken. Having been deeply humbled, I can have compassion for others in tough situations. While part of me still wants to feel powerful and give orders, the Christ in me cares more about the people I’m relating to than my image (136).
Read this helpful book, which will help you to approach work first from the perspective of godly virtue, rather than primarily as a means to accomplishment, achievement, or as Charlie Sheen would say, “winning.”
Who Should You Vote For? How About…Babies?
Over at Patheos, I just blogged on who I’m voting for this presidential election season. This topic afforded me the chance to talk more broadly about how abortion is not simply a position, one among many that we could choose. It is instead a holistic theology. It is, specifically, a theology of death.
Peter Greer of HOPE on “Broken Aid” & the Gospel
My friend Josh Good over at AEI’s fantastic Values & Capitalism project just sent around an interview with Peter Greer. According to Values & Cap, Peter is President and CEO of HOPE International, a global non-profit organization focused on alleviating both physical and spiritual poverty through Christ-centered microfinance in some of the most challenging places around the world, including Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo and Haiti.
If you like thinking about responsible, church-friendly, gospel-driven social justice work that is friendly to entrepreneurship and aware of the power of the market to affect health for individuals, this will be like catnip to you. I found Greer’s answers manifestly biblical and helpful. Here’s a snatch from the broader interview (and see these helpful thoughts on the D’Souza scandal):
What are the economic realities that shape the way that HOPE International conducts its work across the globe?
Aid is broken. Economist Bill Easterly writes that despite a massive increase in aid to Africa over the last 40 years—$568 billion—most African countries are not better off. In fact, many growth rates have plummeted.
We have sufficient data to know that the only way for an economy to grow is through the private sector.
The Brookings Institution reports that since 2005, 70 million people each year are escaping poverty. According to the 58: campaign, between 1981 and 2005, extreme global poverty was cut in half, from 52 to 26 percent. This progress is largely the result of investments and job creation.
Consider China. Thirty years ago, China had more people, percentagewise, living in poverty than every country except four. Today—through economic growth—poverty has been reduced from 84 to 16 percent, according to the World Bank.
Today even Africa is poised for change. Private investments have generated more than 1.7 million jobs (from 2003 to 2010)—bypassing the effect of aid, according to the 2011 report published by Business Action for Africa and Ernst & Young.
Job creation and investments, not aid, is what will cause Africa to experience growth, development and a much brighter future.
Filed under entrepreneurs, missions, social justice
Announcement: Beginning ThoughtLife–New Patheos Blog–on Monday
I have some exciting news to share–at least, it’s exciting if the atomized world of overheated evangelical blogging matters greatly to you. Come Monday, October 22, 2012, I am beginning a new blog, ThoughtLife, on the Patheos Evangelical Portal. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this exploding corner of evangelical social media, but it’s led by Timothy Dalrymple, a Christian public intellectual and wizard of entrepreneurial cultural engagement.
To use locker room language, I am pumped up to blog for Patheos. I’ll join evangelical thought-leaders like Tommy Kidd (and the Anxious Bench crew), Joe Carter, David French, Adrian Warnock, Fred Sanders, and a host of others. I will continue to operate this humble little blog and will post regular content here (especially related to the ministry God has given me). But my heavy-duty public square engagement will take place over at Patheos.
A major part of what drew me to Patheos was the vision Tim laid out after beginning discussions about such a move. I am all about a big, bold vision. Here’s a slice of what Tim has said he wants the Evangelical Portal to be:
The center of gravity of the Evangelical Channel presently rests just left of center. While the Evangelical Channel will continue to support its current roster of writers fully, it will seek to fortify its offering in Reformed and Baptist writers, and in culturally-savvy center-right social commentators.
There is not now a single venue that attracts compelling commentary from young, conservative evangelical public intellectuals. While maintaining our strengths in center and center-left writers, then, we’re eager to extend our strength rightward on the spectrum. This is partly to represent American evangelicalism better, partly to give a new generation of conservative evangelicals a voice, and partly to form a more thoughtful approach to social and cultural engagement amongst conservative-leaning evangelicals.
You can read the whole thing here. I love this blueprint. Tim is right: there is currently no major go-to resource for conservative evangelicals on culture and public square issues. We have excellent media hubs for theology, spirituality, the gospel-driven Christian life, and news and issues affecting the church. But we very much need a home for evangelical public intellectuals. Patheos has drawn a number of gifted progressive Christians, but it’s clear that the Evangelical Portal is featuring and more recently has been featuring a treasure-trove of conservative evangelical cultural engagement. That’s just terrific to see.
Again, to be alongside outstanding evangelical scholars like the aforementioned Tommy Kidd and Fred Sanders is beyond exciting to me. I want ThoughtLife, and indeed much of my work, to be a kind of accessible David Wellsian take on culture and the public square. In other words, I want to bring all the megawatt scholarly power of the Bible, theology, and history to bear on modern issues (though I will probably have more to say about basketball and hip hop than Wells (!), a major intellectual influence on me–and fellow TEDS grad). The gospel remixes life.
So: get ready to add a new RSS feed and to “follow” a new blog. You don’t need to drop your association with this little site; I’m still going to be “here,” so to speak. But I hope you’ll join me at ThoughtLife and make my experience there as profitable, sharpening, and downright fun as things are here.
Filed under blogging, cultural engagement
Family Policy Lecture at Family Research Council
Next Wednesday at 12:30pm, one week from today, I’ll be giving the Family Policy Lecture at the Family Research Council in Washington, D. C. My lecture is entitled “The Sacrificial Witness of the Christian Moral Tradition” and will span history, theology, ethics and public policy. I will engage the liberal Protestant tradition and its understanding of public square involvement in the course of the lecture.
I am honored to give this lecture, which has featured speakers like Os Guinness, Eric Metaxas, and Ross Douthat, but I am excited to speak on this topic at a thinktank that is doing a great deal to contend for the faith in the public square.
Here are the details from FRC:
The Christian influence in Western society has played a vital role in shaping our nation and the world. Many, such as the great British abolitionist William Wilberforce, have used their Christian faith to inform and drive moral policies. To divorce the Christianity of these men and women from their political action would do a disservice both to them and to history itself.
In today’s world Christianity is often seen as a religious relic of the past. Dr. Owen Strachan issues a clarion call to the next generation of Christians to realize the times demand a strong biblically-grounded, moral witness. Born out of a spirit of sacrifice and humility Christians, must speak out for godliness and righteousness in our public sphere. Dr. Strachan will explain what must be done if the great Christian witness of the past is to once again influence our culture and its government.
You can register for the live-stream here. You are of course welcome to fly to DC to hear this lecture–consider yourself invited, in fact. But the live-stream might just work better for some.
By the way, FRC is currently leading the charge for Dr. Angela McCaskill, who was suspended from her post at Gallaudet University for supporting traditional marriage by signing a petition. You can show support for McCaskill by going here. I would encourage you to do so.
Filed under ethics, public square
