By Craig Wong…
One morning when she was twenty-six years old, Simone Weil waited outside an unemployment office, hoping to find more factory work. She’d been fired from her previous factory job and needed to find another. That morning, she did not find the work she needed; instead, she found something “miraculous” that transcended the grim business of factory work and unemployment. She found “total comradeship” with two fellow job seekers: a fifty-eight-year-old man interested in photography and an eighteen-year-old man with a taste for drawing. Weil writes of the encounter in her Factory Journal, “Total comradeship. For the first time in my…
Some Bible verses bother me, especially the ones that tell me to do things I don’t like. Then there are the scriptures that are downright troubling. I have a hard time with the verse in Philippians 2:3-4 that tells me to esteem others as higher, better, and more important than myself. In a way, I can even love my enemies more easily than esteem those with whom I disagree, because to love isn’t quite the same as to esteem. But to esteem others as higher? How can I imagine that? And, of course, the great trouble is that there is…