Most people would rather be doing something than sitting alone thinking, a new study finds, even if it involves self-administering a painful electric shock.
Across 11 studies, psychologists at the University of Virginia and Harvard University had people sitting on their own in a featureless room for between 6 and 15 minutes (Wilson et al., 2014).
Professor Timothy Wilson, who led the study, which is published in the journal Science, said:
"I can't go to your church, I'm not a Republican."
That was what a pastor friend of mine heard from a neighbor to whom he was reaching out. He eagerly replied, "You don't have to be!" to which his friend responded, "But everyone at your church is."
That's hard to argue when it is true.
So, why does that matter? Well, it matters in a way that might surprise you. You see, this is not a blogpost about politics, but about the gospel—and the need for it to be clearly understood.
The fact of the matter is that the more you to go church, the more likely you are to be a Republican. That's just math. (See my earlier article with cautions about that reality.) The less you go to church, the more likely you are to be a Democrat. (There are individual and group exceptions, but that is what the media call "The God Gap." Don't yell at me about it—I did not create math.)
Just this morning, the third judge in this trend was handcuffed and led away from the scene of an accident. In this case, the courtroom parking lot. That's right, she's accused of running over the gate to the lot and then ramming a parked sheriff's car.
Since his release on Saturday, white-hot controversy has dogged US Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was exchanged for five senior Taliban leaders. The Taliban held him captive for the past five years. Bergdahl is being branded as a deserter for abandoning his unit in eastern Afghanistan.
On Sunday at a White House press conference, President Obama with Bergdahl's parents Robert and Jani at his side announced Bowe's release. Earlier this week, Phil Proctor, pastor of Sterling Presbyterian Church, an Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Sterling, Virginia, began distributing an email in response to questions he was receiving about the Bergdahls since he served as their pastor and has remained close to the family. In the five years since Bergdahl's capture, there has been a nationwide campaign for his release with many posters describing Sgt. Bergdahl as a POW.
At a family holiday dinner last week, it finally dawned on me that certain people I consider smart and beautiful consider themselves stupid and hideous.
Granted, I spent most of my life considering myself occasionally stupid and more or less hideous, but no one has ever considered me beautiful, so that's different. Well, almost no one. But those few who did were clearly out of their minds.
It wasn't my family's holiday event. The family in question was a loved one's family, with whom I have spent countless holidays over many years. Not that I always wanted to.
Lately, we've been discovering addiction to wealth. Or, I should say, rediscovering.
It began with Sam Polk's op-ed in the New York Times, "For the Love of Money."
In my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million — and I was angry because it wasn't big enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was addicted.
Polk, as they say, knew of what he spoke: he was "a daily drinker (hey!) and pot smoker and a regular user of cocaine, Ritalin and ecstasy," and had been suspended from Columbia for burglary and arrested twice. The only thing important to him was his girlfriend. "But even though I was in love with her, when I got drunk I'd sometimes end up with other women."
In her 1993 book Cognitive Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder, Linehan notes the essence of validation:
The therapist communicates to the client that her responses make sense and are understandable within her current life context or situation. The therapist actively accepts the client and communicates this acceptance to the client. The therapist takes the client's responses seriously and does not discount or trivialize them.
Validation is also a powerful parenting tool.
In fact, it's one of the most important things you can do for your child, according to authors Karyn D. Hall, Ph.D, and Melissa H. Cook, LPC, in their book The Power of Validation.
In a sense, Antonin Scalia is ATL's spirit guide.
But when he went after an attorney appearing before him, he got immediately chastised by a fellow justice and raised the ire of even conservative commentators.
In this instance, I'm going out on a limb and say Justice Scalia was absolutely, positively, 100 percent right….
I hope you do surprise yourself from time to time. Why? Because that's a sign that you're attuned to the complexity of your own psyche. You acknowledge (and forgive yourself) for not being a single, unitary, consolidated person. Instead, you are a person who is diverse, divided, growing and learning. Good for you – even though it may not always feel so good.
It's one of the members of my holy trinity of good mental health (along with a good diet and regular exercise).
Over the ages, sleep and depression have proved to have a dysfunctional, angry relationship.
In his classic rule for monastic living, Benedict recommends that the community recite the Lord's Prayer together several times a day to help uproot the thorns of contention that spring up in community life. I believe that corporate confession on Sunday mornings can work in much the same way.
Of course, anyone can sleep walk through confession. You may begin to pray with good intentions, and may even be painfully conscious of having done something regrettable, when suddenly you are preoccupied with whether or not you took out the dinner rolls to thaw.
I'm sure that by now you've all heard the story about the wealthy white teenager who killed four people while drunk driving. As we mentioned in yesterday's Non-Sequiturs, 16-year-old Ethan Couch got off — sentenced to therapy — because the judge agreed that the kid was a victim of "affluenza": his parents gave him everything he wanted, and he believed that being rich meant that he wouldn't have to face consequences for his actions.
The kid's not wrong; the fact that he's not facing incarceration for killing four people kind of proves the point. A poor white kid would be in jail right now. A rich black kid would be in jail right now. A poor black kid would be picking out items for his last supper right now. Anybody who thinks that this kind of lenience would be given to anybody other than a wealthy white dauphin is wrong and stupid (and probably racist). The rich kid isn't in jail because rich people don't suffer the full force of consequences for their actions.
Nothing I have shared on Twitter has been retweeted and favorited as much as this diagram on lawyer profiles by Matt Homann (@matthomann).
If there's such a thing as a viral tweet in the legal arena, my tweet today of Homman's diagram qualified. People favorited the tweet all day long. Countless people retweeted it. Some said Homman's diagram was going straight to the marketing department at their firm.
Why? Because Homman is spot on. Clients could generally care less where we went to school and what law firm we worked at 17 years ago.
The public is not looking for a profile that reads like Martindale-Hubbell. People want to know how accessible you are, how they can connect to you on social media, and where they can read non-legalese items authored by you that demonstrate your passion and care.
Video gaming causes increases in the brain regions responsible for spatial orientation, memory formation and strategic planning as well as fine motor skills. This has been shown in a new study conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Charite University Medicine St. Hedwig-Krankenhaus. The positive effects of video gaming may also prove relevant in therapeutic interventions targeting psychiatric disorders.
In order to investigate how video games affect the brain, scientists in Berlin have asked adults to play the video game "Super Mario 64" over a period of two months for 30 minutes a day. A control group did not play video games. Brain volume was quantified using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In comparison to the control group the video gaming group showed increases of grey matter, in which the cell bodies of the nerve cells of the brain are situated.Choosing life instead of death demands an act of will that often contradicts our impulses. Our impulses want to take revenge, while our wills want to offer forgiveness. Our impulses push us to an immediate response: When someone hits us in the face, we impulsively want to hit back.
How then can we let our wills dominate our impulses? The key word is wait. Whatever happens, we must put some space between the hostile act directed toward us and our response. We must distance ourselves, take time to think, talk it over with friends, and wait until we are ready to respond in a life-giving way. Impulsive responses allow evil to master us, something we always will regret. But a well thought-through response will help us to "master evil with good" (Romans 12.21).-
A small number of Christian missionaries live in slums too. They are there by choice.
About 100 of them, mostly from the United States, New Zealand, and Australia, met near Bangkok this past April. They gathered under the banner of "New Friars."
The New Friars don't seem to merit high-profile attention. Their efforts to alleviate poverty are small next to the work of many missionary and nonprofit groups and the problems they address.
Yet we do well to listen to the New Friars, because of the way they themselves are listening to God and neighbor, to suffering and hope on the crowded margins of society. They address vital questions about missions today, and about how all Christians might practice our vocations with sacrifice, devotion, and hope.
