Sublime

the pastor’s job was not to take people into sacred time or uphold the sacredness of ordinary life but to help people flourish, and it appeared that the new secular disciplines of psychology and sociology were much more helpful in this vein.

Managers’ fundamental task, according to O’Brien, is “providing the enabling conditions for people to lead the most enriching lives they can.”

When we pay attention to practices, we are likely to notice the significance and beauty in small acts of grace and truth. We have a framework for talking about what is good and holy in our ordinary communities, and for seeing how we can strengthen places that might need it. While dealing with practical concerns, practices can also help move our dis

put a spiritual insight to a story, an experience, a face; describe where it anchors in the ground of your being; and it will change you in the telling and others in the listening.

Warren’s building, and his own style, represented an openness, even a partnership, in helping individuals find their own purpose by allowing Jesus to help each person flourish and overcome the malaise that the age of authenticity seemed to leave in the wake of its individualized freedom. Yet Warren did not do this by speaking against individualized

Frederick Buechner writes that your calling is found “where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

He makes sense of our life and our commitments in a world that thinks what we are doing is naivete at best and folly at worst. He has turned our world upside down.

What if, instead of starting from the assumption that human beings are thinking things, we started from the conviction that human beings are first and foremost lovers? What if you are defined not by what you know but by what you desire? What if the center and seat of the human person is found not in the heady regions of the intellect but in the gut