It is necessary for healthy individuals, communities, and societies.

Hi and happy Sunday.

Michael Reneau is a managing editor at The Dispatch and is based in Greeneville, Tennessee. Prior to joining the company in 2022, he was editor of WORLD Magazine and for several years was editor of a daily newspaper in East Tennessee. When Michael isn’t editing, he stays plenty busy with his wife and four kids.

Karen Swallow Prior, Ph.D., is the author of “The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis” (Brazos 2023). She is a regular columnist at Religion News Service.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French priest and philosopher had a statement he would sometimes use; “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

I like that statement because it emphasizes that while a human being is a union of a spiritual soul with a material body, it is that spiritual soul that is eternal, while the body is not.

Remembering that it’s your spiritual soul that is supreme can help keep in mind that practicing kindness and love towards your fellow human beings is of the outmost importance. You don’t practice kindness because it’s good for your physical or mental health, which is the health of the mortal body, you do it for the health of your spiritual soul, which is immortal.

Every act of unkindness or cruelty leaves a mark on that soul, every act of kindness and love helps add Grace to that soul.

Very good point. CS Lewis wrote, in a similar vein, and I paraphrase, that good and evil increase at compound interest. In other words, the more good one does the easier it is to do good. There are limitations to that rule but a habit of holiness does bring its reinforcing benefits.

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It is necessary for healthy individuals, communities, and societies.

Hi and happy Sunday.

I like that statement because it emphasizes that while a human being is a union of a spiritual soul with a material body, it is that spiritual soul that is eternal, while the body is not.

Every act of unkindness or cruelty leaves a mark on that soul, every act of kindness and love helps add Grace to that soul.

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