Then, treating people like objects is not only acceptable but is required behavior. It’s the culture of exchange, the tyranny of marketplace values.

The more attention focused on dysfunctional bonds, the more the message that families are all a bit messed up becomes commonplace and the greater the notion becomes that this is just how families are.

To know genuine love we have to invest time and commitment.

Greed characterizes the nature of this pursuit because it is unending; the desire is ongoing and can never be fully satisfied.

If consumers want to be entertained, and the images shown us as entertaining are images of violent dehumanization, it makes sense that these acts become more acceptable in our daily lives and that we become less likely to respond to them with moral outrage or concern.

The choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in the other.

What made these individuals exceptional was not that they were any smarter or kinder than their neighbors but that they were willing to live the truth of their values.

Spiritual life is first and foremost about commitment to a way of thinking and behaving that honors principles of inter-being and interconnectedness.

Much as I enjoy popular New Age commentary on love, I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to individual self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community. Packaged as a commodity, spirituality becomes no different from an exercise program.