Newsletter

This week I started writing a new column for a magazine called Common Good, “a place for thoughtful commentary on and stories about the diverse people and ideas shaping faith, work, economics.” The column is called “Quick Notes on the Economy,” where I try to summarize in a few hundred

The talk of the town centers on inflation. The Wall Street Journal reports estimates of over 5 percent in the coming months. For many of us, we see these headlines and we have a general awareness that inflation is bad, but that’s about it. So what are we talking

Experts say that the top 10 percent of United States income earners have only grown richer over the last several decades. This has led many to criticize wealthier Americans for “taking” from poorer Americans. They show you charts like these in the New York Times that presumably prove the point,

Last night, I was on a Zoom call to pray for my Bible study leader’s health. He’s in the hospital on a ventilator, sick with covid. We prayed for a miracle. But I couldn’t help but think that the miracle happened a year ago when scientists used

Financial professionals are paid to predict the future. The challenge, as someone once said, is that making predictions is hard, especially about the future. Any future event is uncertain, and uncertainty brings risk, which is why the value of a dollar is worth more today than a dollar in the

New York City has GPS coordinates of 40° 43' 50.1960'' N and 73° 56' 6.8712'' W. But that doesn’t tell you much about the place. From those numbers you don’t see rays of sunset painted across an old church, you

Ministry doesn’t always have to look like working full-time in a church. It could look like finance or marketing or HR. In other words, broadly defined, “ministry” could be corporate America. That idea gets to the heart of an ongoing debate about business and how to create a

When you read this sentence, how do you interpret it? Do you try to understand what I intended to say, or do you draw your own conclusions? Does it matter when I wrote this sentence, or can the meaning of this sentence evolve over time? These questions represent a concept

Years ago I had the idea for this column. Many organizations aimed to make the world a better place, to motivate employees, to create purpose. At the bottom, however, these are spiritual questions, theological inquiries ill suited for the business mind. What is purpose? What motivates people, and why? What

Every month I host a gathering of my coworkers called Wine Chats, where we, you may have guessed, drink wine and chat. The topics are always different, always controversial, and always met with civility. I do this because we all need a model for how to have civil discourse among