ICYMI

• Lakelight hosted its second annual Good Work Summit last Saturday. Here are a few memorable quotes:

1. “If your vision can be accomplished without God or somebody else, it’s too small.”

2. “What does God expect from you in a day, a week a month, a year, a lifetime?”

3. “The goal of the Christian life is not for you to become a superhuman. It is for you to become fully human.”

A Recommendation

• The Institute for Faith, Work and Economics listed 5 podcasts that will inspire your faith and work this fall.

Articles

• Yours Truly, the Esteemed & Very Humble author of your weekly GoodFinds, wrote about transformations within the American Right in a book review published by The Gospel Coalition.

• Penn Professor Amy Wax was suspended for publishing “inconvenient facts” about race.

• There is an increasing segment of Christians “who claim to be evangelical but rarely go to Church”

• Christianity is resurgent among the British intelligentsia. Read more about it here.

• A Christian who works in advertising reflected on the true and false stories her industry propagates.

  • A quote: “For the first time in human history, most of the stories about people, life, and values are told not by parents, schools, churches, or others in the community that have something to tell, but by a group of distant conglomerates that have something to sell.”

• Advice on how to manage mental fatigue throughout the day.

• One way to grow as a leader? Become a great teacher.

• A worker’s productivity declines so drastically beyond the 55 hour a week mark, that putting in any more hours is pointless according to a new study conducted by researchers at Stanford.

Paywalled

• Jessica Grose highlighted “the education crisis that both candidates are ignoring.” Unlike both political parties, we conducted a deep dive into the latest national report last week.

• Ross Douthat was profiled by the New Yorker on “how he speaks faith to the secular world”

• On Social Media and Teen Mental Health — again. (New Yorker)

• On which issue have Americans made the most dramatic shift in public opinion over the last 8 years? Find out here. (The Atlantic)

• We read a lot of articles (so you don’t have to.) One we regularly return to is David Brooks’ “How America got mean.”

The Headline Of The Week

• “You Are Going to Die” - who wouldn’t want to read that?

Deep Dive

• Americans At Home (All from NYT’s Census Data Report)

  • America The Land Of Home Bodies - The average amount of time spent at home increased by 1 hour and 39 minutes per day from 2003 to 2022.

  • Why?

    • Remote work - The rise in working at home during the pandemic has been a big chunk of that, taking up 29 percent of all work activity in 2022.

    • Zoom Prayer - 59% of religious activities took place in the home in 2022, up from 24% in 2003.

    • Screen-agers - People between the ages of 15 and 34 have had the greatest increase in time at home. In 2022, they spent about two more hours in their house compared with 2003.

      • Plug: You can learn more about this in Jean Twenge’s book Generations (which we don’t receive any royalties on, but we probably should at this point).

    • TV - The number one leisure activity for Americans is watching TV, with the average American watching 2.7 hours per day.

One Last Thing

• Harvard’s Happiness Guru Arthur Brooks wrote about “The Kind of Love That Makes Us Happiest”. If you can’t get behind the Atlantic’s paywall, then we’ll summarize it: the most satisfying intimate relationships are more friendship than passion, more steadfast kindness than whirlwind romance. It’s groceries and laundry, attentive listening and quality time.