Life 101, A Wise Man's Advice for Adulthood

"Whose Desire Turns", mixed media by Tim Holmes On this Valentine's Day I found myself thinking about relationships, which makes me think of good jokes and here's a great one:  A couple of strangers, a man and woman, are assigned to births in a single sleeping compartment. They talk for a few minutes but are both tired so they turn in, she on the top bunk and he on the bottom. A few minutes later she says "I hate to trouble you but I'm a bit chilly, could you please reach me an extra blanket? "Oh I have a better idea", he says. "Why don't we just pretend we're married?" "Oh that sounds interesting", she says, "just what do you have in mind?" He replies, "I'll tell you what: get your own damn blanket!" I come from a long line of married couples. As far back as records go, there are no divorces until I come along and ruined the whole picture! Not because I didn't dedicate mysel...

I don't see how without giving up their faith. Say you own a food store. The first person steals or doesn't pay their bill in full and you already have a contest between your career and your faith. Of course what we do in this culture is you take that guy to the cleaners because of the social contract, which says that stealing or not paying your bill is illegal. So, leaning on the law, you can force collection or send the guy to jail without any hesitation, though clearly you did not feed the hungry. In fact, this scenario comes perilously close to what the Mafia does if a deal goes awry: take the guy's kneecaps off! Nowhere in our One Nation Under God, in whose currency we claim to trust, is there a Christian asterisk for the penal code: *except for cases of hardship, sickness or nakedness. So if Christianity is not intended for the business world, for what alternative is it intended, some Sunday School world where people already are screened for purity? In the e...

T his is an essay directed to my Christian community, which I write out of love. I have no one in particular in mind, but all of us devoted, faithful followers of Jesus, dedicated to the church and especially to Christianity the Lifestyle, are eager to improve our ability to follow Christ, or so I believe. It is this belief in a genuine desire for self-improvement that prompts me to write this. I have recently had the opportunity– so far unique in my life of 55 years– to witness one way in which my friends within the Christian community have behaved in a remarkably similar and quite un-Christian way. It would not be so glaring to me if it were not for the fact that many of my non-Christian friends don't have this hangup. I have pondered what this could be about and I have some thoughts to share. What particularly makes me write is a comment made by a non-Christian friend, so often heard from outside of it, that the church is full of hypocrites; (and that this is the reas...

It’s what sells everything marketable, spices up films and TV, floods the internet, and reportedly crosses a young man’s mind every three seconds. Downright disgusting. We have a love/hate relationship with sex: we are sick of it appearing everywhere and yet we can never seem to get enough. What is it with sex that everybody knows what it is and yet it is indefinable, transitory and it entirely escapes any attempt to civilize it? Why can’t we just grow up and move on? I agree with Thomas Moore, who says in his wise and delightful book "The Soul of Sex", that it is precisely because we cannot truly absorb its nourishment that we become so obsessed with sex. Sex is a wildness loose inside our humanity that will forever remain outside of our attempts to control or even understand it. As a sculptor who has worked with the subject of the nude for 30 years I have to wrestle with the volatile dynamics of a subject that no longer refers primarily to the fertile human as it did t...