Sublime

We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place. It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of

When we stop worrying about smartphones just in terms of content (what we’re looking at) and start to consider the rituals that tether us to them throughout the day, we’ll notice that the very form of the practice comes loaded with an egocentric vision that makes me the center of the universe.

What are the things you do that do something to you? What are the secular liturgies in your life? What vision of the good life is carried in those liturgies? What Story is embedded in those cultural practices? What kind of person do they want you to become? To what kingdom are these rituals aimed? What does this cultural institution want you to lov

For some people this feeling is not a dramatic crisis. It’s just a creeping malaise, a gradual loss of enthusiasm in what they are doing. The Jungian analyst James Hollis had a patient who explained it this way: “I always sought to win whatever the game was, and only now do I realize how much I have been played by the game.”

At the heart of mental illness is a loss of control over our own better thoughts and feelings.

is perhaps a cliché to say that our humanity is displayed best and enjoyed most when faced with serious limitations, but it is true for all that. Without distractions, we notice what is around us. Without rewards, living closely with others, we see how our activities and actions meet or fail to meet real human needs. We become more able to focus on

My central life-long passion to know myself and to know God has led me deep into myself, meeting all that I find there. Sometimes my focus has been solely psychological, at other times purely mystical. I have needed many times to relearn that the source of enduring happiness is within and is not dependent on any outer situation, person, place, or t

My colleague remarked how strongly he agreed with Frankl about the importance of nourishing one’s inner freedom, embracing the value of beauty in nature, art, poetry, and literature, and feeling love for family and friends.