Marginal Christianity

By Laura Douglas-Brown | Emory Report | June 28, 2016 Religion professor Brent Strawn advocates for a "thick" understanding of happiness that includes social concerns and even encompasses sorrow. Editor's note: Since this interview was originally published on June 30, 2014, it has consistently ranked among the most read articles in the Emory News Center. As the Fourth of July holiday again approaches, Emory Report spoke with Professor Brent Strawn about why a "thick" understanding of "the pursuit of happiness" may be even more important in our current political climate. His additional answers appear at the end of the interview. More than just fireworks and cookouts, the Fourth of July offers an opportunity to reflect on how our founders envisioned our new nation — including the Declaration of Independence's oft-quoted "unalienable right" to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." But our contemporary understand...

May 1, 2015 by Lee C. Camp, host of Tokens Critics are, well, so critical. But nonetheless much is to be learned from them, even if I say so begrudgingly. I do think that one of the finer parts of being raised Southern is our suspicion of those who speak in such (over) confident, (over) authoritative ways. The Southern pejorative use of “Yankee” is, in large part, a judgment upon such (over) esteem for one’s viewpoints. For all the foolishness of the Lost Cause mentality, there is something about that ethos that serves a constructive social function of questioning the powers. So, as a Southerner, I have often enjoyed reading social critics, as diverse as Leo Tolstoy and Reinhold Niebuhr, and even one of the greatest of modern haters of Christians, Friedrich Nietzsche, whom I first started reading as an undergraduate many years ago.  There are many supposedly cultured despisers of Christianity who, with condescension oozing from their blog comments, frankly don’t know what the...

  By STEVEN QUARTZ and ANETTE ASP APRIL 11, 2015 Inside Photo   campaign: nyt2015_sharetools_mkt_opinion_47K78 -- 271975, creative: nyt2014_sharetools_mktg_opinion_47K78 -- 375123, page: www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/opinion/sunday/unequal-yet-happy.html, targetedPage: www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/opinion, position: MiddleLeft THE gaping inequality of America’s first Gilded Age generated strong emotions. It produced social reformers like Jane Addams, anarchist agitators like Emma Goldman, labor leaders like Eugene V. Debs and Progressive politicians like Theodore Roosevelt. By the 1920s, sweeping legislation regulating food and drugs and breaking up corrupt trusts had been passed. The road to the New Deal was paved.   But our current Gilded Age has been greeted with relative complacency. Despite soaring inequality, worsened by the Great Recession, and recent grumbling about the 1 percent, A...

JAN. 5, 2015       David Brooks                           Not long ago, a friend sent me a speech that the great civic leader John Gardner gave to the Stanford Alumni Association 61 years after he graduated from that college. The speech is chock-full of practical wisdom. I especially liked this passage:   “The things you learn in maturity aren’t simple things such as acquiring information and skills. You learn not to engage in self-destructive behavior. You learn not to burn up energy in anxiety. You discover how to manage your tensions. You learn that self-pity and resentment are among the most toxic of drugs. You find that the world loves talent but pays off on character.   “You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you; they are thinking about themselves. You ...

Slowing down, being generous and fighting for peace are part of Pope Francis' secret recipe for happiness. In an interview published in part in the Argentine weekly "Viva" July 27, the pope listed his Top 10 tips for bringing greater joy to one's life:  (read more http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/1403144.htm

EMILY ESFAHANI SMITH   JAN 9 2013, 8:06 AM ET   "It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness." In September 1942, Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents. Three years later, when his camp was liberated, most of his family, including his pregnant wife, had perished -- but he, prisoner number 119104, had lived. In his bestselling 1946 book,  Man's Search for Meaning , which he wrote in nine days about his experiences in the camps, Frankl concluded that the difference between those who had lived and those who had died came down to one thing: Meaning, an insight he came to early in life. When he was a  high school student , one of his science teachers declared to the class, "Life is nothing more than a combustion process, a process of oxidation." Frankl jumped out of his chair and responded, "Sir, if this is so, t...

People who are happy but have little-to-no sense of meaning in their lives have the same gene expression patterns as people who are enduring chronic adversity. EMILY ESFAHANI SMITH AUG 1 2013, 8:00 AM ET For at least the last decade, the happiness craze has been building. In the last three months alone, over 1,000 books on happiness were released on Amazon, including  Happy Money ,  Happy-People-Pills For All , and, for those just starting out,  Happiness for Beginners . One of the consistent claims of books like these is that happiness is associated with all sorts of good life outcomes, including — most promisingly — good health. Many studies have noted the  connection  between a happy mind and a healthy body — the happier you are, the better health outcomes we seem to have. In a meta-analysis (overview) of 150 studies on this topic, researchers put it like this: “Inductions of well-being lead to healthy func...