Where No One Sees
Tue 09 Dec 2008 • Responses: 1 • by Sir Richard Dannatt
Character and Leadership in an Age of Image
An address by General Sir Richard Dannatt, KCB CBE MC ADC Gen, at an event at Rhodes House, Oxford, sponsored by the Trinity Forum Europe.
A Teaching Moment
Mon 08 Dec 2008 • Responses: 1 • by Al Sikes
A framework of calling and character
Trinity Forum Chairman Al Sikes looks at the current economic crisis as an opportunity to reanimate the timeless wisdom of Solomon for our culture.
Let all mortal flesh keep silence
Thu 04 Dec 2008 • Responses: 2 • by TTF Staff
If there never be a silence in the soul, and a man goes on always with his own thoughts and schemes and endeavours, it brings about a moral and spiritual madness. That is tenfold worse than mere madness in the brain, when a man judges everything by false ways, puts a wrong value on everything, thinks little of great things and much of little things—that is a common way with all of us more or less, only, thank God, with some of us it is growing less.
There comes a silence every now and then; and God makes it just to put a stop to this kind of thing, and give himself a chance of speaking.
Excerpted from George MacDonald’s sermon “Alone with God,” preached in Westminster Chapel, London; transcribed for the publication The Christian World Pulpit, reprinted in George MacDonald, ed. William J Peterson, Proving the Unseen (Ballantine Books, 1989). Thanks to the George MacDonald e-mail list.
Odysseus and the Seduction of Leadership
Wed 03 Dec 2008 • Responses: 1 • by Paul Vanderbroeck
What should drive your choices?
Executive coach Paul Vanderbroek takes another look at Odysseus. Together the Iliad and the Odyssey tell us a story of a young high-potential leader who let himself be seduced into leaving wife and family to embark on what seemed to be a noble project . . .
Loconte on Niebuhr in Books & Culture
Mon 01 Dec 2008 by TTF Staff
Senior Fellow Joseph Loconte has a review essay in the November/December 2008 issue of Books and Culture on the new edition of Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History. “The Irony of American Politics”:
Nevertheless, many Niebuhr admirers have a disposition that blunts much of his message. They have fastened onto his critique of America's national foibles and used it like an axe to dismember U.S. foreign policy under the Bush Administration. Remarkably, they tend to ignore the religious core of Niebuhr's political thought: his Christian understanding of the tragedy of human nature. It was this German-born theologian, after all, who tried to reclaim the biblical doctrine of original sin during the inter-war period.
On the Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
Wed 26 Nov 2008 by David Aikman
Fourteen Years On
Senior Fellow David Aikman reports on the speeches of Mark Noll and Nathan Hatch at the November Senior Fellows Dinner, reprising themes from Noll’s landmark 1994 book.
Democracy and the Intelligentsia
Wed 26 Nov 2008 by Micah Mattix
Charles Kurzman, Democracy Denied, 1905–1915: Intellectuals and the Fate of Democracy, Harvard University Press, November 2008. 405 pages, $49.95
When I was a teaching assistant at one of Switzerland’s cantonal universities, one of my colleagues once told his students that they, as the intellectual elite of the country, were responsible for protecting Switzerland’s liberal democracy against dangerous attacks on individual freedom from the extreme right. The face of that extreme right was Christoph Blocher, who became a member of the Swiss Federal Council in 2004, and who took a number of public positions that encouraged xenophobia and racism. As my colleague spoke, however, he seemed to lump religious conservatives with Blocher as potential enemies of liberal democracies worldwide. The reasoning, it seems, was that religious conservatives too worked to limit individual freedom, in particular with respect to moral issues such as gay rights and abortion.
Johnston Profile in Christianity Today
Wed 26 Nov 2008 by TTF Staff
Senior Fellow Douglas Johnston was featured in “The Father of Faith-Based Diplomacy,” an article on Christianity Today in September.
Johnston, a globetrotting 69-year-old, founded the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy (ICRD) eight years ago because he saw religious faith as a catalyst for peacemaking, instead of a basis for conflict. Johnston . . . has learned that Muslims will listen more closely to a Christian than to the typical secular Westerner. Johnston doesn't evangelize, but his center's Christian motivation and framework are clear. "If you can operate on a faith-based basis, you find that, particularly with Muslims, they really open up," says Johnston. "This is what they like to think they're about. They get very uncomfortable dealing with just secular constructs."
The World Standing Beside Me
Tue 18 Nov 2008 • Responses: 1 • by Jo Kadlecek
She didn’t mean to make me sad. My colleague’s words were short and brave, but there was no mistaking the heavy worry she felt as a mother.
“He’ll be here for a ten-day break,” she smiled. “Then back to Iraq for another tour. But really, it’s been okay. He’s okay.”
When I asked how she was doing, she emphasized the ways in which her son’s courage had grown during his twelve months away from home, how his sense of humor was still intact and his weekly phone calls encouraging.
How Does Culture Change?
Thu 13 Nov 2008 • Responses: 8 • by John Seel
The Hunter Thesis
John Seel presents James Davison Hunter’s emerging thesis on cultural change. The right strategies start with a right understanding of how culture is made, and changes. It starts with recognizing the difference between Esperanto and E*TRADE.
