Natalie Audelo

This paradox—deep longing for spiritual encounter, paired with weak interpretive infrastructure—calls for a renewed theological imagination.

In their view, U.S. foreign policy is largely the servant of corporate interests—the military-industrial complex, energy companies, and “major corporations, banks, investment firms, ... and policy-oriented intellectuals who do the bidding of those who own and manage the private empires that govern most aspects of our lives.”

Hard work isn’t always the work that takes the most time, or the work that gets paid the most. The hardest work is the work that challenges, makes us uncomfortable, or requires change. If we actually value hard work — we have to do some of our own.

And here’s the hard part. You can’t just decide fuck individualism, I’m blowing it up . You have to replace it with a better, more equitable story of who we are as a country and how we organize our society. Which, for a lot of people, would mean giving up a modicum of power. Liberal white people can loathe the effects of individualism and still ben... See more

In the natural world, nothing goes to waste. Matter constantly decomposes and reconstitutes in new shapes, serving new purposes. We have much to learn from this continuum of transmutation in human societies, where we throw “away” our waste to some invisible hereafter, rather than accept the truth: it remains.

We need to stop fearing boredom and be comfortable with what is going on around us, whether it’s exciting or not. This is an argument made eloquently by my colleague Ellen Langer, who defines mindfulness as the practice of actively noticing new things. You can do that only when you are not distracting yourself.