For the last seven years, I’ve battled chronic pain and illness. A traumatic back injury in 2013 was only the beginning of what these years have held for me. Intense treatments and therapies with very slow results kept me hopeful…
Coronavirus presents a challenge to mental health as well
The physical effects of coronavirus aren’t the only cause for concern as churches — and the whole nation — navigate COVID-19. With much uncertainty over the virus itself, professionals report increased anxiety and stress due to health concerns, unemployment, social…
My Coronavirus Summer: Coping with grief and seeking joy
None of us are exempt from significant loss at some point in our lives — loss of loved ones, property, health, income. Losses often pile up on one another, and the world seems to turn upside down overnight. After my…
Is it OK to feel how I’m feeling?
In this quarantine life and racial upheaval, it seems that everywhere we turn, someone is telling us how we should feel. Or rather how we shouldn’t feel what we are feeling. Are you afraid? Stop! Are you too calm? Stop!…
Listen to the teenagers: Things are not right
I work in public education, but I’m not a teacher, administrator, custodian, social worker or a member of the cafeteria staff. I’m something far stranger, or, according to at least one student I met during the course of my work…
Q&A: Is that grief or depression you’re experiencing due to COVID-19?
People are recoiling from multiple aspects of the reality that’s impacting their lives on social, emotional and financial levels.
I was a pastor struggling with depression. The evangelical community offered virtually no helpful resources
Depression stole my soul and buried it so deeply that (with apologies to the Apostle Paul) for me, to live was not Christ at all, but to die most assuredly would have been gain.
If we truly believed in God, how could we be sad?
Christians with a “winter spirituality” may wonder if they really do believe because the mountaintop is never a part of their faith journeys. Yet, as Martin Marty argues, their faith is just as real and valid as any other, just sung in a different key.
Listening to depression as a spiritual and political practice
The bad news that our world isn’t fine, that life is profoundly unfair, misaligned and wobbly and violently broken should tell us all something important about depression – namely, that depression isn’t wrong to declare life on earth uninhabitable; it’s just terribly misguided about what causes our maladies and exactly what solutions provide their remedy.