Posts tagged "Happiness"
Another Week Ends: Helpful Selves, Happy Meanings, Simple Saints, Good Bishops, Beloved Zombies and Portland Missionaries
Church / Film / Humor / Literature / Music / Philosophy / Psychology / Religion / TV / Week In Review

Another Week Ends: Helpful Selves, Happy Meanings, Simple Saints, Good Bishops, Beloved Zombies and Portland Missionaries

by David Zahl on Jan 11, 2013 • No Comments

1. Kathryn Schulz (of Being Wrong fame) wrote an article for New York Magazine that’ll get your motors running, “The Self in Self-Help.” It’s a bit of a conceptual quagmire to be honest, esp for those of us who consider God to be more than a metaphor, but it’s also pretty fun. Positively jammed with soundbites, a few of which include:

[The master theory of self-help] goes like this: Somewhere below or above or beyond the part of you that is struggling with weight loss or procrastination or whatever your particular problem might be, there is another part of you that…

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Five Golden…Themes! What We Just Couldn’t Get Enough of in 2012
America / Everyday / Film / Identity / Music / News / Politics / Psychology / Relationships / Sports / Technology / Theology / TV

Five Golden…Themes! What We Just Couldn’t Get Enough of in 2012

by Ethan Richardson on Dec 14, 2012 • 4 Comments

One of Mockingbird’s most distinctive features is the repetition. Like Christmas itself, we’re trying to point that one “old, old story,” that ancient theme, as we see it dug up time and again. It’s dug up in all sorts of places, of course, from 18th century poetry archives to slasher films, from church basements to top-tier corporate office towers. But it’s still resonating a singular focus–the Gospel–from these unforeseen, albeit obscure, sources.

Despite the wide-spanning scopes and intentions of some of our favorite “news” sources, the same thing unwittingly tends to happen. After all, reporting the news means telling and retelling…

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Comics

A Quick Calvin and Hobbes

by David Zahl on Jul 12, 2012 • No Comments

Better Off Now Than Ever? A History of Happiness
Economics / Psychology

Better Off Now Than Ever? A History of Happiness

by WB on Jul 11, 2012 • 1 Comment

In a recent New Republic article entitled Happyism: the Creepy New Economics of Pleasure, economist and historian Deirdre McCloskey provides a refreshing historical perspective on the contemporary world’s obsession with happiness. For better or worse, it seems that personal happiness has increasingly become the (explicit) driving force behind human lives. While selfishness is of course nothing new, it’s strange that its vocabulary has largely shed ambition, prestige, virtue, or professional competence as goals independent of ‘happiness’ – though they would still be included under a happiness rubric. Needless to say, the prioritization of happiness over these other components of a…

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Adam Phillips on Carpet Peeing and the Happiness Addict
Addiction / Children / Law / Psychology / Suffering

Adam Phillips on Carpet Peeing and the Happiness Addict

by Ethan Richardson on Jul 9, 2012 • No Comments

Very much in tune with The Atlantic‘s explosive chain of articles the last couple weeks on “having it all,” Phillips goes into the mind of the misbehaving child, the unrealistic expectations we have about being happy, how often good is associated brethren with happy, and the gift that acceptance can bring to human suffering and sadness. It comes from his book On Balance.

There is one fundamental experience that every parent has with their child, and that every school teacher has with the children they teach, which is: you can’t tell a child that they are not enjoying themselves, you can…

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Comics / Humor

A Slightly Less Quick Calvin and Hobbes

by David Zahl on Apr 25, 2012 • No Comments

(Synthetic) Happiness and the Difference Between a Challenge and a Threat
Psychology / Social Science

(Synthetic) Happiness and the Difference Between a Challenge and a Threat

by David Zahl on Jan 11, 2012 • 2 Comments

In 2006, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness was published, and it’s since become something of a pop landmark for the burgeoning social-/neuroscience field of “Happiness Research.” The Harvard Business Review recently caught up with Gilbert and he shared a few recent insights that I found interesting. For example, frequency is more important than intensity when it comes to positive experiences. And the distinction between synthetic and natural happiness, which was also new to me, might have some serious theological potential. Gilbert’s findings also serve as an encouragement, perhaps, for folks that find themselves in less than ideal…

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Fancies of Satisfaction: A Psychoanalysis of Pain, Pleasure, and the Good Life
America / Identity / Psychology / Suffering

Fancies of Satisfaction: A Psychoanalysis of Pain, Pleasure, and the Good Life

by Ethan Richardson on Nov 9, 2011 • 5 Comments

The New York Times blog snagged a brilliant interview with British philosopher and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on Western culture’s fixation with happiness. According to Phillips, this notion that a good life is a happy life is a detrimental misnomer that consequently drives the individual into deeper dissatisfaction. Insofar as pain happens regardless, the pursuit of happiness is an unachievable end, an ideal unrealized. This cultural philosophy is fundamentally hedonistic, “evacuating pain” and caulking the holes with something more palatable. It sees pain as a privation–an appetite–and in fear seeks to substitute the appetite with an overfeeding of the wrong kind…

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The Subjective Power of an Objective Gospel
Religion / Testimony / Theology

The Subjective Power of an Objective Gospel

by Mockingbird on Jul 12, 2011 • 7 Comments

This little reflection by Mbird’s Jacob Smith and David Zahl has made the rounds recently, first in Logia: A Journal of Lutheran Theology and second on The Gospel Coalition (where it generated quite the conversation!). We thought we’d repost it here for, you know, posterity:

The great Southern novelist Walker Percy once asked in his essay “The Delta Factor,” “Why does man feel so sad in the twentieth century? Why does man feel so bad in the very age when, more than in any other age, he has succeeded in satisfying his needs and making the world over for his own…

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Don’t Worry, Be Happy… Or Else
Law / Psychology / Science / Social Science

Don’t Worry, Be Happy… Or Else

by David Zahl on May 4, 2011 • 2 Comments

“Is Happiness Overrated?” asks Shirley Wang in a recent Wall Street Journal article, surveying the results of a recent study at the University of Wisconsin. The findings revolve mainly around the distinction between hedonic  and eudaimonic well-being, aka, short-term vs. long-term happiness, pleasure vs fulfillment, etc. Of particular interest to us is that, while not without some overlap, the two categories do seem to be somewhat mutually exclusive. In other words, what we think will make us happy and what actually makes us happy are often two different things. Moreover, the overt pursuit of happiness (“I must be happy”) –…

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Alvin Wong: The Happiest Man in America
Everyday / News / Psychology

Alvin Wong: The Happiest Man in America

by David Zahl on Mar 7, 2011 • 4 Comments

Fun little article in this past weekend’s NY Times:

The New York Times asked Gallup to come up with a statistical composite for the happiest person in America, based on the characteristics that most closely correlated with happiness in 2010. Men, for example, tend to be happier than women, older people are happier than middle-aged people, and so on.

Gallup’s answer: he’s a tall, Asian-American, observant Jew who is at least 65 and married, has children, lives in Hawaii, runs his own business and has a household income of more than $120,000 a year. A few phone calls later and …

Meet Alvin…

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