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Jesus Was a Literature Professor
Literature professors are a determined lot. Our goal is to deepen our students’ engagement with the text at hand. We desperately want them to dive for the pearls deep below the surface and come up triumphant, gasping for air and eager to go deeper next time. I am aware that literature professors weren’t a thing in Jesus’ time. Jewish students who sat under their rabbis studied the Old Testament (though not as Christians today understand it.) They became rabbis and scribes, teaching what they learned to the next generation. And then came Jesus. He understood all the old texts and the traditional ways of reading them. But the way he…
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Despair: The Aim of the Abuser
Despair is not often discussed, though it is considered a dangerous psychological condition. Psychology Today describes despair as: … profound and existential hopelessness, helplessness, powerlessness, and pessimism about life and the future. Despair is a deep discouragement and loss of faith about one’s ability to find meaning, fulfillment, and happiness, to create a satisfactory future for oneself. The goal of an abuser is to produce the elements of despair in another person. In speaking with the victims of this abuse and having suffered as one myself, I am always surprised at how difficult it is to admit to the intentionality of emotional abuse. Victims often invent excuses for their…
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How to Find Your Why
All successful salespeople recognize the importance of the why. After all, one must have a powerful why in order to make cold calls that result in rejection far more often than not. I often ask my students why they are in college. And a few have an answer. Most just shrug their shoulders and when pressed, admit that they are there because either they have nothing else to do with their lives or because their parents made them. Sometimes students enroll in college, enter into debt, and then flunk out, simply because their why was weak or worse, nonexistent. Finding the words that explain the meaning for your life can…
Healing Through Art & Words
