Who Do You Say I Am

"WHAT ARE THEY saying about me? What do you think about me?" Everybody has asked these questions but when Jesus of Nazareth posed them to his friends at Caesarea-Philippi, an ancient Roman cosmopolitan city on the edge of the Sea of Galilee, he started a discussion that continues to baffle, enrage and inspire people two millennia later. I have always wondered if these were real or trick questions. Was Jesus cornering Peter into giving the right dogmatic answer, later to be included in sacred writings, or was this an open question addressed to all people? I don't want

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Bringing Yourself To Work

WE HAVE BROUGHT our children and pets to work and regularly dress down on Fridays to improve relations and productivity. Now it is time to do something really revolutionary – bring ourselves to work! It is odd to consider something taken for granted so much as lugging our personality and life into the office day by day; yet, my experience has been that most employees bring only a fragment of themselves to work. Call it the "work self" or the "company automaton"; whatever it is called, it is far from a full-blown person. We are not getting enough out of

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A Response to Jack Maggs

LITERARY SCHOLARS HAVE called Jack Maggs a post-colonial re-telling of Dickens' Great Expectations. As I read it, Jack Maggs, by the witty Australian author Peter Carey, is a deconstruction of Charles Dickens himself. The message tears apart the pretensions and presuppositions of the great man, turning the original message of Great Expectations on its head and giving us a more satisfactory resolution than the original. 

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