Earlier this spring I read, and very much enjoyed, Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. Despite what the title might sound like, it’s not a self-help book. And, to tell you the truth, it’s not really about happiness. It’s actually about what makes us unhappy. In particular, it’s about why we are often so poor at predicting what will make us happy. The answer, it turns out, has a lot to do with our memories and, especially, the fragile, even malleable nature of our memories. I don’t know about you, but I tend to think of memory as something akin to a video camera, silently recording all of our experiences. It might be hard to...

Near the end of July I’ll be participating as one of nine keynote speakers at a conference called “Rethinking Stewardship” at Luther Seminary. I’ll be joining the likes of Chris Farrell (of Minnesota Public Radio and APM’s Marketplace Money) and Nathan Dungan (of Share, Save, Spend) to talk about new approaches to stewardship. Our understanding of stewardship is that it’s not simply asking people for money but helping them relate to money in light of their faith – something almost every Christian I know has stated as a desire. How, that is, does our faith in Christ inform our lives as economic as well as spiritual beings? How...

Food is all the rage these days, especially concern about how bad so much of our food is. There’s the incredibly successful and compelling Supersize Me, the documentary following one man’s decision to eat only MacDonalds meals and the devastating effects it has on his body. More recently, HBO produced The Weight of the Nation. Today’s “Wednesday TED Talk” turns the spotlight on British chef turned media personality Jamie Oliver, who has been on a crusade for several years now to change the way we eat. More specifically, he is trying to change the way we feed our children. Oliver is one of the few folks in the...