Barbara Brown Taylor talks about finding freedom from workaholism

June 21, 2013

What’s Saving Your Life Today?
In her 2006 book, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, and again in An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith (2009), Barbara Brown Taylor talks about what it is in our lives that is (figuratively speaking) “killing us” and what it is that is “saving us.” Interviewed on this two-and-a-half-minute video from the “Work of the People” website, Tayor is asked to give her own answer to  the questions: “What makes your soul sing?” And “What is saving your life today?”  She talks about the simple things in life and redefining success to mean freedom to be, rather than constantly working to the point of exhaustion.  Related: On the PBS Religion and Ethics Newsweekly website, watch another video from a few years ago (or read the transcript) as Barbara Brown Taylor describes what her workaholism as an Episcopal priest, considered one the of the best preachers in the English-speaking world, was doing to her—even though it was work for God and others.  And she talks about the path she took in breaking free of the pressure.  Both videos are well worth watching and pondering.

Letha Dawson Scanzoni is an independent scholar, writer, and editor, and is the author or coauthor of nine books. In 1978, she and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott wrote Is the Homosexual My Neighbor?, one of the earliest books urging evangelical Christians to rethink their views on homosexuality (updated edition, 1994, HarperOne). More recently, Letha coauthored (with social psychologist David G. Myers) What God Has Joined Together: The Christian Case for Gay Marriage (HarperOne, 2005 and 2006). Another of Letha’s most well-known books is All We’re Meant to Be: Biblical Feminism for Today, coauthored with Nancy A. Hardesty (Word Books, 1974; revised edition, Abingdon, 1986; updated and expanded edition, Eerdmans, 1992). Letha served as editor of Christian Feminism Today in both its former print edition (EEWC Update) and its website for 19 years until her retirement in December 2013.

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