Blog

Among those who study consciousness and evolutionary biology, there’s a question so basic and so unsolvable that it's simply called “the hard problem.”1 The hard problem is, in basic terms, how did the mind/soul/consciousness come to exist? When did creation as we...

One of my early church jobs was as a youth pastor at a church that had a youth ministry that deeply siloed from the rest of the congregation. We operated in our own building, with our own volunteers and staff, largely disconnected from the larger congregation. Our...

In 2019, my husband and I took a trip to Sedona, Arizona. We would spend our mornings hiking in the red rocks and then, in the afternoon, check out one of the wineries in Verde Valley. Our first afternoon, we wound up at a winery called “Javelina Leap.” The logo was a...

When I was a youth pastor, I went through a process of deep listening and demographic  research with the community where I served through a youth ministry innovation research initiative.1 I worked with largely well-resourced, high-achieving kids, and these kids and...

In 1948 a psychology professor named Dr. Bertham Forer distributed a detailed personality inventory to 68 of his students. It asked them a wide range of questions about their preferences, anxieties, and ways of engaging with others and themselves. The next week, he...

I was listening to an interview1 with a woman who had just written a book on mental illness in animals, and she said this: “When we try to get a bird to solve a puzzle, we tell ourselves we’re testing to see how smart the bird is, but all we're really testing is how...