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.

So simplistic it's a sin

I just read the Eichenwald Newsweek article on the Bible. It starts out swirling the toilet bowl of scholarship, but is at least floating by the end of the essay. It begins as Erhman fundamentalism, as if someone deified the works of Bart Ehrman* (and his ilk) and then parroted all his talking points, but without his nuance or scholarship to back it. Large swaths of this article lend itself to a line by line refutation, but that comes across as petty and defensive. While I have great sympathies with his take on right-wing culture, I was very saddened by his scholarly naivety. And it alarms me that he plays that loose with the facts (and his editors let him get away with it). If you want me to get specific, ask me about almost any point of scholarship made in the beginning of that article (and much of it later), and I can direct you to historical evidence which substantially modifies or altogether refutes the points he is making.

New Year's Resolutions 2015

The ball has dropped. The calendar has flipped. The holiday break is almost over.

And thus, I suppose it is time to do this year's obligatory resolutions (which, in fact, are continuations of things I am already working on).

However, on the supposition that if I make my decisions public, I have a greater chance of actually accomplishing them, here are my resolutions for 2015. I have limited myself to 5 goals, because I tend to accomplish things in sets of 3 or 5. God created us to evolve with five digits, so that is a pretty handy way of keeping track. And so without further ado, my New Years resolutions for 2015: