I’ve spent a lifetime trying to better discern Jesus’ great parable on the organic tension between God and mammon. I am always smitten with Jesus’ admonition that shrewdness matters profoundly in the navigation of life.
Having lived my professional life in Washington, D.C., this tension between the world and Providence seems to come to the fore more often than any other single pressure point, and none more so than in our contemporary era.
Plato, the founder of Western philosophy, wrote 25 timeless texts. Among his nuggets of gold: “The measure of a man is what he does with power.”
Plato was imagining measurable power over the lives of others. I suspect the Greek philosopher also was thinking about the power each of us has over ourselves, the idea of self-mastery—and not merely power over others.
An observation often attributed to another great man in the…
