I‘ve been thinking about Diane Zemke’s work in Being SMART about Congregation Change when she pointed out that churches are either founded on the concept of common identity or common bond. She explained that churches founded on common identity tend to form around a shared vision of the founding members.Diane Zemke, Being SMART about [...]
In my line of work I get to spend a lot of time with apologists who travel locally and internationally training men and women to defend the truth claims of Christianity in an increasingly secularized world. I’m in their company quite a bit and so inevitably I get lumped in with them. Each time [...]
Save for the author’s ardent commitment to Darwinian evolution, there is much to learn and appreciate from Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. I also wished he addressed an important corollary of his project, namely, the grounding of morality. But that may be exclusively in [...]
Ross Douthat, writing in 2012, could have waited just a few more years before penning Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics to include forthcoming distressing events, nicely rounding off his jeremiad observation of Christian decline in the United States. In a few years he could have included on his list the increased [...]
I still remember vividly the time when one of my colleagues looked at me with derision when I mentioned nonchalantly that I did not have my phone with me. She had texted me just a few moments prior and had expected a quick response. I do not recall the content of the message but to [...]
Reading Jennifer G. Berger and Keith Johnston’s Simple Habits for Complex Times brought back bad memories and good ones as well. Bad because of the avoidable mistakes and anxieties in leadership I had made years ago when I managed a university campus bookstore; good because of the lessons learned. At the height of my [...]
In my last blog post I sought to bring to the fore some of what ails our beliefs and behaviors of Christianity in the West but more specifically in the United States today. In this post I would like to continue where I left off; and that is to offer a hopeful way forward [...]
Neil Postman, an American social critic, professor and author, best known for his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, compared two dystopian visions of the future. The famous version is from George Orwell. He saw a future in which totalitarian states ruled with fear and control. His classic novel 1984 created a world in which [...]
I wish I had come up with this clever title. I owe it to Dr. Vishal Mangalwadi, a scholar of Indian descent. The title comes from a series of lectures based on his book The Book That Made Your World in which he helps the reader understand the root cause of the West’s decline [...]
This hit close to home. The study of leadership, leaders and what makes them tick has fascinated me for a number of years. I mean, who doesn’t t get excited to hear the latest developments from Apple each time Steve Jobs was on stage and utter his famous words, “… there’s one more thing.” [...]
