"Gossip Is a Spiritual Issue" by Callie Glorioso-Mays

Relevant Magazine has published an insightful article on gossip by a writer named Callie Glorioso-Mays.

The author opens by confessing her own propensity to gossip and laments that gossip is seen as acceptable and perhaps unconquerable.

She uses evocative word pictures:

Each time we gossip and brush it off as a minor, respectable sin, are we simply strengthening our immunity to the Holy Spirit’s conviction?

Like a house that looks fine except a slightly creaky floor or leaky roof, we want to believe that gossip is a superficial and trivial issue in our lives.

But gossip is more like a house filled with termites, feasting away at the frame of that house and inflicting severe damages. The result is that the façade still stands, but gossip has wormed its way into our core, leaving us a hollowed-out shell.

Glorioso-Mays then goes for the heart of gossip--pride and idolatry. She identifies four different idols that lead to gossip: superiority, retribution, acceptance, and control. Readers of Resisting Gossip will recognize how these would map onto the gallery of gossips of chapter three and could hopefully extrapolate more possible idols that would also lead to gossip as well as gospel solutions to each one.

She ends with a promise of increasing spiritual health if we can cut out our soul-hurting diet of gossip.

Read the whole thing.