Rotundus.com

It's kind of interesting how people seem to find that exhibiting emotional behaviours like encouragement and gratitude can be scheduled, and that scheduling them makes them start to seem more natural after a while. Perhaps I should do the same. Here's one Christian approach to this:

One day it occurred to me that I was going to have to discipline myself to encourage others. And so I took the strange and seemingly-artificial step of calendaring time to encourage others. It sounds strange, I know, but I opened up my calendar and created a 5-minute appointment recurring every three days. The appointment simply said “Encourage!” And so, every third day, while I was hard at work, a little reminder would flash up on my screen. “Encourage!,” it said. And I would. I would take the opportunity to quickly phone a friend or dash off an email to someone I felt was in need of encouragement. This felt very artificial. I felt like a fraud as I, with a heart of discouragement, attempted to be an encouragement to others. But as time went on, it began to become quite natural. I soon found that I no longer felt the same spirit of discouragement within me. Encouragement slowly became more natural. What had begun as a discipline that felt artificial, soon became a habit that felt natural.

- Source: Tim Challies

... but the same sort of idea also seems to pop up in secular materials:

Finally, we can remind ourselves to be grateful for what we have. This may seem trite, the sort of thing one hears from parents or ministers, and then ignores. But individuals who regularly experience and express gratitude are physically healthier, more optomistic about the future, and feel better about their lives than those who do not, and they are more likely to achieve personal goals.

And unlike adaptation, the experience of gratitude is something we can affect directly. Experiencing and expressing gratitude actually gets easier with practice. By causing us to focus on how much better our lives are than they could have been, or were before, the disappointment that adaptation brings in its wake can be blunted.

- Source Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice, p. 179

See Cartoons by Cartoon by Cameron Cardow - Courtesy of Politicalcartoons.com - Email this Cartoon

It seemed rather disturbing to me when, while watching some TV coverage of the Olympics, in response to the first Canadian to win a gold medal at home, one spectator announced that she'd never been prouder to be Canadian. Aren't we taking things a little far? (Particularly when hosting the Olympics means being denied the ability to call spade a spade, or a burger a burger)

I mentioned a while back that Christopher Hitchens seems to have a better grasp on what Christianity is than do a fair number of "Christians".

Here's another related comment on current beliefs from Susan Jacoby from a Washington Post debate in which she argued that 'religion' has a negative effect on society:

I think that in America, organized religion has lost ground to a flabby "spirituality" that makes no real demands on people. As a secularist, I see this amorphous spirituality as another sign of the dumbing down of popular culture. No demands, no history, nothing except what you personally feel at a given moment.