Recommendations, Education, Church, Identity
John Beeson
This Week's Recommendations

  1. Three ways attending church could extend your life: Rebecca McLaughlin says, “What you almost certainly won’t hear is that weekly church attendance is one of the very best things you can do for both your body and your mind. But that’s what researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health have found. In fact, they have discovered that going to church can add multiple years to your life.”

  2. K-12 workers have highest burnout rate in US: Stephanie Marken and Sangeeta Agrawal report, “More than four in 10 K-12 workers in the U.S. (44%) say they "always" or "very often" feel burned out…

This Week's Recommendations
Identity, Recommendations, Sexuality
John Beeson
Resources for a Sexually Confused Time

How does a Christian make sense of a world where our understanding of sexuality and gender has turned into quicksand underneath our feet?

Here are four books I commend to you to help you engage some of the hardest questions relating to sexuality and gender.

Resources for a Sexually Confused Time
Gratitude
John Beeson
Injustice: The Gratitude Snatcher

I pray you had a blessed Thanksgiving. I hope your heart entered into this past week with a spirit of gratitude and that your time with friends, family, and God only heightened that gratitude.

No one wants to walk in ingratitude, and yet gratitude can be so quickly snatched from us.

What destroys thanksgiving? There are many threats: envy, pride, and selfishness. But one sneaky snatcher of gratitude is injustice. When the earth quakes with injustice, its tremors rattle our hearts and our trust.

 When we experience injustice, questions swirl: Why would God allow that wrong to happen? How could He let this grievance happen to me? Won’t the wrongdoer be punished? Won’t the victim receive restitution?

Injustice: The Gratitude Snatcher
Recommendations, Gratitude, Leadership, Nature
John Beeson
This Week's Recommendations

  1. How to practice gratitude (even when you don’t feel it): O. Alan Noble says, “We like to think of gratitude as an overflowing feeling directed at others—an outpouring of love and warmth. But sometimes warmth doesn’t come. Even still, another’s kindness deserves our gratitude. What are we to do when we don’t feel grateful but know we ought to be?”

  2. Fight burnout with thanksgiving: Ajith Fernando writes this to pastors, but it’s applicable to everyone. “I have come to notice that the most joyful people in my life and ministry are also the most thankful, and joyous people experience freshness as they go about their service. God’s grace is a means of freshness over the long haul.”

This Week's Recommendations
Christian Living, Gratitude, Prayer
John Beeson
Becoming What You Hate

In the fall of 1997, I arrived at Gordon College. Nestled 45 minutes northeast of Boston, Gordon’s beautiful campus sits in the heart of New England. This southwest kid was about to get the full New England experience. And you can’t have a New England experience without experiencing her fans.

Just three years later, the newly minted coach of the Patriots, Bill Belichick, would draft Tom Brady with the 199th draft pick of the 2000 NFL draft. At that point, the Patriots had logged a sad 68-92 record in the 1990s.

Becoming What You Hate

meditation

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. If you want to be miserable, then spend your money like this: Morgan Housel begins, “Tell yourself that you’ll be satisfied once you make just a little more money, have a little bit nicer home, and can spend just a little bit more than you do now. Ignore the fact that the group you’re in now used to be a dream that you thought would bring you contentment and happiness.”

  2. If you ask AI for marriage advice, it’ll probably tell you to get divorced: Samuel James with an important post. “I’m convinced that part of the emerging polarization between men and women has to do with the increasingly niche information streams that men and women are immersed in. Men see the excesses and abuses of feminism daily. Women see the excesses and abuses of masculinity daily.”

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Can Yoga be Christian?

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Can Yoga be Christian?

Would it surprise you to know that according to at least one study, 20.4 million Americans practice yoga?[i] Can Christians do yoga? Should Christians do yoga? When my wife approached me with an interest in considering practicing Holy Yoga (Christian yoga) I admit my default position was skepticism. For me, it smacked of the Oprah Winfrey-ization of contemporary American Christianity. I expected it to be seeped in self-help-ism and having the thinnest of Christian veneers.

Others have even stronger objectives: how can yoga, a practice developed first by Hindus, be able to be used by Christians? Isn’t that akin to Christians sacrificing on pagan altars? Stronger still: doesn’t yoga open Christians up to the presence of demonic presences?

Yoga means “to yoke.” In a Hindu context, it is understood that the goal of yoga is to free oneself from attachments to yoke together mind, spirit, and body with the Divine. For Hindus this is accomplished by emptying oneself to become part of the Supreme Consciousness.

Hindu yoga practice believes that the postures in yoga pay homage to open oneself up to spiritual energies (chakra theory). Some believe that Ishvara, who is mentioned in the Yoga Sutras, is a personal god (others argue Ishvara refers to a “special self” or “spiritual self”.[ii]  Some argue that the often-repeated “Om” breath in traditional yoga refers to Ishvara.[iii] It is argued is not a “religiously neutral practice that Christianity can be plugged into.”

Some argue that yoga predates its relationship with Hinduism,[iv] but whether or not that is true, it is clear that Hinduism was the ground that yoga grew up in and was propagated. Furthermore, there is no doubt that yoga, as traditionally practiced, is not religiously neutral.

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