>It is a well-worn cliché, the one asserting that none of us likes working, that the very condition of having to maintain a job is an unpleasant one, that most of us would rather be doing almost anything else than seeing through those professional obligations that are necessary for our continued existence on this expensive, demanding planet. In fact, says a new survey commissioned by the Canadian Education and...
Six billion people clinging to this spinning blue marble, each with unique fingerprints and breakfast preferences, but make a public declaration of your chosen profession and brace for instant, universal judgment. You’re a doctor? they ask, the words loaded with assumption. Or: You sell used Hyundai’s? And there are those assumptions again—though this time considerably less generous. A slew of studies have been...
Armed with the fierce belief that a person’s professional and spiritual lives are not mutually exclusive, R. Paul Stevens has written a book on how to integrate the two. Taking Your Soul to Work: Overcoming the Nine Deadly Sins of the Workplace is Stevens’ latest literary production, a follow-up to 2008’s Doing God’s Business: Meaning and Motivation for the Marketplace. A former pastor who works as a professor...
Everyone can benefit from a bit of skepticism. Making assumptions about something simply because of the absence of any competing data may sell McNuggets, but it doesn’t necessarily advance one’s life in a productive way. It’s on this truism that the Centre for Inquiry bases its existence. An educational charity that bills itself as “Canada’s premiere venue for humanists, skeptics and freethinkers,” the CFI seeks to...
Obama has one, or at least he did until some of the guy’s comments drew unfriendly fire for the president’s association with him. So did Paul, the transformed disciple from the New Testament whose less savory buddies knew him better as Saul. And so does Gabrielle Giffords, the American congresswoman whose injury at the hands of a crazed killer in Arizona vaulted her tragically into the headlines recently. Indeed,...