Texas: Just say "no" to thugs

Today I wrote a short letter to my Texas State governor, senator and representative about the "Open Carry" legislation making its way through Austin. If enacted, I fear such legislation will make suburban Texas look like some caricature of an Old West boomtown with insecure, over-anxious, under-prepared people packing, and scaring my children "because the law says we can". There's a whole Star Trek episode dedicated to this proposition in fact. Well worth watching.

The Crisis Point of Human Evolution

This will probably wind up being one of my more hokey blog posts, and it will probably bear the stamp of staying up too late at night watching videos about aliens on youtube (oh the things we do when insomnia strikes!). But, then again, perhaps this needs to be said. And on the off chance it might need to be said, I guess I will say it.

A Theology of Leadership

Recently, in applying for a program of graduate studies in educational leadership, it became clear that I have a rather glaring lacuna in my training and education up to this point: In depth reflection on the goals and processes of leadership. It occurs to me that, while I have read fairly widely and written on many aspects of pastoral life, from Biblical studies to Liturgy, from Systematic theology to Systems theory in Congregational Development, from Ecumenical Councils to Crisis Counseling, I have never focused on leadership as such.

Leadership is something I do every day, and something I teach others about. But I have never delved deeply into the theoretical foundations of leadership, and I would characterize my own understanding and practice of leadership as largely mentor-based, intuitive, and "caught rather than taught". So, with that said, I would like to express both systemically and yet somewhat naively what leadership is to me, why I think leadership is important, how I have seen leadership practiced and mis-practiced, and most importantly, how leadership reflects the nature and purposes of the Triune God.

The Superstition of the Science of Superstition

A colleague of mine recently sent me an article from the Atlantic entitled "The Science of Superstition", which appears to be a précis  of a book by the same name. This article claims to do something that very badly needs to be done here in the buckle of the Bible-Belt: Open our eyes to the dangers of the superstition and magical thinking that cloud our everyday lives and judgements.

However, I will admit that my first reaction to this article is one of minor disdain, as if the author is quite naive about all of the assumptions he is making about "the way things really are", and the fact that there are myriads of PhDs in every field of research who would question his basic assumptions. There are many, in fact, who might call his assumptions mere "superstitions" made without reference to empirical observation, nor without reference to the background assumptions that make science itself work.