Home Page

Washington Institute - Connecting Faith & Vocation & Culture
 
by Steve Garber

Years ago now, I began to wonder why it was some students I had loved kept at the vocation of their faith, and others did not. Never a theoretical idea, these were people that had become part of my heart. We had walked together, read together, prayed together, laughed together. And then, inch by slow inch, they began to walk away, disconnecting what they said mattered most from the way they made decisions about both the present and the future-and over time they became different people.....MORE >


Our Aim >

The Washington Institute is a still-point...connecting knowing and doing, heart and mind, belief and behavior, worldview and way of life...

We invite you in
Vocare: Conversations about Calling >

We all long to do work that matters. Young people hope and dream for vocations that require their best, that somehow make money and make meaning at the same time...

More Programs
Steve Quoted in Christianity Today >

The November 2009 print issue of Christianity Today has a thoughtful cover article on "Songs of Justice, Missions of Mercy: Why Christian musicians are embarking on a different kind of world tour ". Be sure and read it (and don't miss Steve Garber in it).




“Thy Kingdom Come” through Hands of the Healers

by Bill Haley

Several times a day, the Medevac helicopters fly hurriedly over the house in Washington, DC where we used to live. Either it is flying to someone in distress, or it is carrying the most precious thing, a human being, back to the hospital for healing. If the one in that helicopter is being rushed back to the hospital for care, will they receive excellent medical care, and that is all? Or will they get that plus the gracious and powerful touch of doctors and nurses who know that their hands somehow are the hands of God to bring healing to a broken world and broken bodies?


CAPITALISM WITH A CONSCIENCE
Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, the Tiananmen Square Leaders, and You

An address delivered at Urbana 09 in the Business as Mission track by Steve Garber

Two years ago this week I was in India, visiting two of our children who were working there that year. We didn’t see everything, at all. But we did travel through the south, in Tamil Nadu and Kerala—and of course in our seeing and hearing and smelling, were keenly aware that we were in a very different world.



How Much is Too Much?
Wrestling with the Place of Culture in Devotional Life

by Cary Umhau

“I was born in a house with the television always on,” sing David Byrne and the Talking Heads in their song Love for Sale. What could be truer than that for most of us? Yet even with the television blaring (and sometimes because of the television blaring), we manage to hear God’s voice in the culture…because He’s everywhere, and not only in a monastery.



The “Now, This…” Culture: Daily News and the Death of Wisdom

by Joe Carter

Confess that you rarely read blogs, listen to talk radio or watch reality television, and most people will make no general assumptions about your intelligence. But admit that you never watch television news, rarely listen to radio news broadcasts and only read newspapers on Sundays,  and you will automatically be pegged as a being ill-informed, out-of-touch, and possibly even anti-intellectual. What is it about daily news that is worthy of such veneration?


Quotables >

"...Renewals and revolutions begin quietly, like faith itself. They start growing from one tiny seed, the staggering thought: things don’t have to be like this..."


John V. Taylor
Bishop of Winchester