Tips for
Small Group Study

1. Use Death by Suburb as an 8-week study on the spiritual disciplines.

2. Each week study one of the 8 chapters that explain the suburban toxins and the spiritual practices that counter them.

3. Download the free discussion guide for a list of questions to guide the discussion for each chapter.

4. Download Dave's Favorite Writers for additional resources on Christian spirituality.

5. Sign up with your email address to receive regular blog updates by the author.

6. Add your suburban story of The Thicker Life to the blog.
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Practice 8

ENVIRONMENTAL TOXIN: Busyness – that the good life will come to pass if I can just get more done, if I can just get my daughter on the traveling soccer team and complete my part-time MBA in less than two years.

SPIRITUAL PRACTICE: To relearn how to play, to fall in love with a day, what Christians and Jews call a Sabbath.

KEY QUOTE: In Chapter 9 (In Love with Time), Goetz writes, “The suburbs are all about saying yes to opportunity and the immortality symbols it promises. Its deep current pulls under your good intentions. We must learn to pursue an affair with time iteslf, to fall in love with a day.”

KEY DISCUSSION POINTS:

* Time is an illusion. The idea that time can be controlled is only about eight centuries old.

* The key is to begin to view time differently.

* A good measure whether you are experiencing a true Sabbath: Can the poor do this?


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DeathBySuburb.net
Copyright © 2005 David L. Goetz
Advance Praise for
Death by Suburb

"Death by Suburb ... addresses and overcomes the split in our religion, our lifestyles, and even our consciousness."
—Fr. Richard Rohr, O.F.M., author of Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer

"With a compassion born of his own experiences of suburban unreality and dysfunction, Goetz effectively evokes a thicker sense of our social and religious worlds."
—Leigh Schmidt, Princeton University, author of Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality

"Goetz sees the parched lives, the truncated spirits beneath the suburban bliss, and the grace too. In his gracious eyes suburbia begins to look like an outbreak of the Kingdom of God."
—William H. Willimon, author of Sinning Like a Christian