There’s a question that comes up almost every time someone expresses interest in spiritual direction, and it usually sounds something like this: Am I ready for something like that? Jim has heard this question more times than he can count — in pastoral care conversations, in introductory sessions, in the quiet pause before someone finally […]
What Fortune got right about emotional intelligence — and the layer it still missed In May of this year, Fortune published a piece that stopped a lot of leadership development professionals in their tracks. Written by David Rock, neuroscientist and co-founder of the NeuroLeadership Institute, the headline made the argument plainly: EQ training is failing […]
What artificial intelligence can’t do, and why that matters more than what it can There is a question the ancient world already knew how to ask, and we keep pretending is new: who is actually making this decision? The Socratic tradition called it the examined life. The desert fathers called it watchfulness. The Enneagram calls […]
Why Canceling Plans Might Be the Healthiest Thing You Do On self-awareness, honest limits, and why pushing through isn’t always the right answer There is a particular kind of guilt that arrives about forty-five minutes before you’re supposed to be somewhere you no longer have the capacity to go. You made the commitment in good […]
The Fish Don’t Talk About the Water In 2005, David Foster Wallace stood in front of a graduating class at Kenyon College and told a small parable. Two young fish are swimming along, and an older fish passes the other way and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” The two young fish swim on for […]
The Desert and What Holds Weight Part Three of a Three-Part Conversation with Eric Pennington There is a particular kind of man who can tell you, without flinching, exactly what a decade cost him — and then tell you, in the same breath, that he wouldn’t trade it. Eric Pennington is that man. I have […]
Part Two of a Three-Part Conversation with Eric Pennington Eric Pennington was bored out of his mind in a conference room. He’ll tell you that himself, with no embarrassment about it. He was sitting with a room full of division presidents, listening to the same conversation he’d already sat through three years earlier — the […]
Part One of a Three-Part Conversation with Eric Pennington There’s a particular kind of loneliness in watching your own life happen to you. Eric Pennington knows it from the inside. As a boy, he remembers feeling almost outside himself — like he could watch young Eric move through his days, present in his own body […]
There’s a particular kind of confusion that comes up almost every time spiritual direction is mentioned. People hear “spiritual” and think church. They hear “direction” and think someone’s about to tell them what to do. Neither is quite right, and the confusion is understandable — it’s an old practice with a name that doesn’t […]
In 1206, a young cloth merchant’s heir stood in the public square of his hometown, took off every piece of clothing he owned, and handed it back to his father along with his inheritance. By any reasonable business measure, Francis di Bernardone had everything: a thriving trade business waiting for him, the kind of security […]
