Our cultural values are making us sad: money, mortality, and fear of missing out.

In a video chat last night, a friend admitted, “I’ve been crying a lot, and I’m not sure why.” COVID-19 has given us many reasons to weep. We’re out of our routines, the stock market has plunged, and we imagine millions dying. This virus and economic crisis punch us squarely where our spiritual armor is weakest: mortality, money, and our fear of missing out.

In 2 Corinthians 7, Paul distinguishes between two kinds of sorrow—a sorrow that “leads to death,” and a “godly sorrow.” The latter “brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret” (v. 10). Godly sorrow, he writes, produces “earnestness,” eagerness to repent, and a “longing” and “readiness to see justice done” (v. 11). The question the church faces now is which kind of sorrow COVID-19 will bring.

We are in the midst of the most widespread societal upheaval that many people alive today have ever experienced. Already our institutions, habits, relationships, and culture are shifting before our eyes. Frank M. Snowden, author of Epidemics and Society, shared with the New Yorker, “Epidemics are a category of disease that seem to hold up the mirror to human beings as to who we really are.” The question we are facing is not whether we will experience sorrow and change; the question is how. As biblical prophets walked with people through catastrophes, their advice was never to just endure until it ends. Instead they focused on proactively changing relationships with each other and with God.

As a cultural anthropologist who grew up in a middle-class white United States home and then lived for much of my adult life in Nicaragua, China, and South Africa, ...

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Parenting children requires a rich understanding of God’s nature.

Mothers today face an onslaught of mixed messages about how best to parent in the 21st century. Podcasts, blogs, and books on mommy-ing abound, but many of them indulge regularly in shallow parenting advice and fallacies about excessive self-care or “me-time.”

In the midst of the coronavirus quarantine, moms on social media often advise diametrically opposed strategies: Take regular mental health breaks while your children gorge on Netflix, or schedule out every minute of children’s at-home education so they don’t fall behind in productivity. The message seems to be either “love yourself first” or “pour all your energy into your children’s future.”

Neither side answers the more important question: How do we mother like Jesus Christ during this particular cultural moment? In the words of an overused adage, “What would Jesus do?”

In Motherhood: A Confession, Natalie Carnes, associate professor of theology at Baylor University, attempts to answer this question by sharing her personal experience of raising three daughters. She follows the structure and style of Augustine’s autobiography, Confessions, and elevates the conversation about motherhood from the self-centered to the spiritual without ever losing touch with the beauty of the ordinary. Part memoir and part theological study, Motherhood: A Confession explores “how motherhood, infancy, and children disclose what it means to be human in relation to the divine.”

Carnes’s core argument is that mothering imitates God. We birth forth disciples, hand down tradition, and grow our children into the church. By knowing the maternal attributes of God, we better mother our own children, and we also ...

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(UPDATED) The St. Louis pastor spoke up about the difficulties faced by leaders and critiqued “celebrity culture” in ministry.

Darrin Patrick, a megachurch pastor, author, and speaker, has died.

Patrick was a teaching pastor at Seacoast Church, a multi-site megachurch based in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, and the founding pastor of the Journey Church in St. Louis, where he lived.

In a Friday evening update, Seacoast Church stated: “Darrin was target shooting with a friend at the time of his death. An official cause of death has not been released but it appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound. No foul play is suspected.”

Patrick’s unexpected death came as a shock to friends and colleagues. Robby Gallaty, pastor of Long Hollow Baptist, in Hendersonville, Tennessee, said that Patrick was scheduled to speak at his church next weekend.

“I just talked to him Tuesday and Wednesday,” said Gallaty. “This is the second close friend I have lost in a year.”

Gallaty first met Patrick in 2015 and had invited him to speak the following year at a men’s ministry event at Long Hollow. Just before the event, he said, Patrick called and said he was leaving the ministry.

At the time, Patrick had been a rising star among Reformed evangelical circles and was serving as vice-president of the Acts 29 church planting network. He was fired from Journey for what church elders called misconduct including “inappropriate meetings, conversations, and phone calls with two women” and an abuse of power.

Despite Patrick’s fall from ministry, the two stayed friends. Patrick admitted his faults and got counseling. He went through a restoration process that lasted 26 months, according to a 2019 blog interview posted at Christianity Today. He returned to the ministry as a preacher but not as a senior pastor of a church. ...

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Quick Facts for Payroll Managers 2010 will help you save time in your day-to-day tasks.

The 2010 edition contains handy "desktop" information such as:q

• Payroll Calendar, weeks are numbered to enable easy calculations
• Charts covering Federal and Provincial labour standards
• Personal income tax data
• CPP/QPP exemptions
• Employment insurance and Workers' Compensation information
• Section on reporting requirements

Publication date: February 2010

If you would like more details about this product, or would like to order a copy online, please click here.

Implementing Best Practices in Human Resources Management will help you to realize the full potential of your department's role in your organization and maximize the positive impact on your business. It ensures that employees and managers understand your organization's expectations, policies, and practices. It helps you become the internal organizational expert, drawing senior management to your proactive approach to HR strategies and confirming how HR is instrumental in helping the organization flourish. It also develops methods for implementing successful HR strategies that will impact the organization's culture, business objectives, and overall success.

Features include:

• Concise discussions of major HR terms and concepts
• Current trends and benefits
• Discussion on definitions
• Procedures for implementation
• Role of HR practitioners and any barriers or pitfalls they might face
• Sample policies
• "Best practice" information
• Over 400 pages of value

Topics covered:

• Alcohol and drug addiction
• Attendance management
• Auditing the HR function
• Benchmarking
• Ethics
• Career management
• Change management
• Coaching
• Competency
• Conflict management
• Employee involvement
• Employee opinion surveys
• Employee testing
• Employee turnover
• Employment contracts
• Employment cycle
• Flexible work practices
• HR Metrics
• Intellectual capital
• Learning organization
• Management development
• Mission statements
• Organizational design
• Performance management process
• Recruitment and selection
• Redundancy/downsizing
• Reward Management/compensation policies
• Stress management
• Terminations
• Virtual organization

If you would like more details about this product, or would like to order a copy online, please click here.

Human Rights Policy in Ontario is a compendium of policy papers and guidelines produced by the Ontario Human Rights Commission in partnership with CCH Canadian Limited. As an interpretive guide to human rights law in Ontario, it will be an indispensable tool for human rights practitioners, human resource specialists and legal professionals. This publication, says the OHRC's Chief Commissioner Keith Norton, is intended to assist everyone in creating an environment where human rights are respected and promoted.

Human Rights Policy in Ontario features the OHRC's new (2000) Policy and Guidelines on Disability and the Duty to Accommodate, as well as updated versions of other policies, including those on drug and alcohol testing, pregnancy, gender identity and sexual orientation. It also reproduces the full text of the Ontario Human Rights Code.

Topics covered:

• Policies and guidelines
• Religion
• Gender identity
• Sexual harassment
• Language, pregnancy, and medical discrimination
• Drug and alcohol testing
• Height and weight requirements
• Racial jokes
• Disability and duty to accommodate
• Special programs
• Human rights complaints
• Ontario Human Rights Code and regulations

If you would like more details about this product, or would like to order a copy online, please click here.

HR Quick Facts 2010 will save you valuable time by putting the answers to HR questions at your fingertips!

The 2010 edition contains handy information including:

• Payroll Calendar, weeks are numbered to enable easy calculations
• EI/CPP/QPP/workers compensation tables
• Charts covering Federal and Provincial labour standards including maternity, parental and other leave regulations at a glance
• Statutory holiday and holiday pay regulations by province
• Hours of work and wage payment charts
• Personnel Records Retention Chart by Jurisdiction
• Prohibited Grounds of Discrimination
• Sources of Other Information – important web site addresses at a glance

Publication date: March 2010

If you would like more details about this product, or would like to order a copy online, please click here.