Leadership

Items on leadership and its personal and public implications

Guptara Audio on Revolutionizing Business

Tue 27 Sep 2005 by TTF Staff

Senior Fellow Prabhu Guptara has a 90-minute lecture available online from the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity.

The lecture, titled “Revolutionising Business,” is available in MP3 format from this site. He addresses three questions: Is there a biblical view of business? What would the consequences be for business issues if so, at a board level? And What might this have to do with the possibility of a radically human practise of business?

Their site has several other interesting articles and lectures that may also be worth your time to peruse.

Buford on Newman

Tue 12 Jul 2005 by Peter Edman

Bob Buford has sent out a passage from John Henry Newman’s sermons as recommended summer reading for his e-mail list. I thought it worth sharing with those of you who might not be on that list.

This is Newman’s Sermon 30, preached on the Feast of St. Luke, ”The Danger of Accomplishments,” from his Parochial & Plain Sermons (1908). As a literature person, I take exception to a good part of the sermon—he falls prey to false dichotomies—but its overall point is well taken.

Now the danger of an elegant and polite education is, that it separates feeling and acting; it teaches us to think, speak, and be affected aright, without forcing us to practise what is right. . . .

Read the whole entry (184 more words)

Prabhu Guptara blogging

Mon 11 Jul 2005 by TTF Staff

Senior Fellow Prof Prabhu Guptara is maintaining a blog on business and spirituality, among several other topics.

His blog is titled “Renaissance: Insights for Action in Today’s World.” Here is a recent snapshot from an interview, answering a question of the recent seeming fad relating spirituality and business:

Fads can be good and useful as well as useless and even horrible! But at least some of the reasons for the fad are negative ones, in that the impact of evolution in the West tore many people away from their spiritual roots in Christianity and the Bible. Now the children and grandchildren of these people are discovering that atheism may be fine as a means of protest against hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty, but atheism provides no answers regarding how to live as an individual or family or how to conduct business or political life - so spirituality is coming back.

Dallas Willard on Ethics

Wed 06 Jul 2005 by TTF Staff

Senior Fellow Dallas Willard is quoted in an article on ethical lapses among leaders in the Christian Science Monitor.

In an article of 6 July 2005, “It’s All Good, Boss!,” correspondent G. Jeffrey MacDonald (whose article has several good insights and quotes from others as well), sets up his dilemma so:

Though everyone struggles to recognize his or her own ethical lapses, the task of catching one’s own errors in judgment becomes especially challenging for high achievers, whether they run major companies or head up a small household. Reasons are several, but one looms largest: People in authority tend to lack the honest input that everyone needs to maintain a moral life.

Dr. Willard is quoted offering a positive vision of calling and moral accountability as a counterpoint to a more traditional perspective that sees ethical dilemmas as only shades of gray.

Read the whole entry (279 more words)

Vox Populi, Vox Stupidity?

Fri 17 Jun 2005 by Peter Edman

Spiked Magazine features an article by University of Kent sociologist Frank Furedi on populism and elites in light of recent events in the U.S. and EU.

“From Europe to America: the populist moment has arrived; On both sides of the Atlantic, the political class has become convinced that the people do not know what is best for them.” (13 June 2005)

A well written and historically aware article covering the bases from the EU constitutional referendum to the 2004 U.S. elections (and some Australian commentary) and the parallel response of many elites.

Fascinating and more than a bit scary in light of the insights raised by the Foucault/Ayatollah essay and my recent reading in Postman’s Technopoly. Technopoly as fundamentalist secularism? Political and even NGO elites openly desire a move from democracy to technocracy, or rule by bureaucracy. It is a quintessentially illiberal notion.

Read the whole entry (445 more words)

Guide: To Change the World

Sun 23 May 2004 by TTF Staff

A discussion guide for the Trinity Forum Briefing “To Change the World” by James Davison Hunter.

Discussion Guide: PDF Download, 96K

You can also

Page 4 of 4. « First < 2 3 4

It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life. . . . Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

Viktor Frankl

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The Real Digital Revolution: Social networking is changing the marketing landscape: “Brand advertising can’t stretch the truth anymore or try and gild the lily. Because if it does, we’re going to find out about it, find out that you’ve been lying to us all along about extras that don’t work and specials that aren’t special. And our reaction is not going to be pretty.” (Alan Wolk, AdWeek; h/t: Ryan Moede • 2008 08 27)

Après Lewis: ‘As it turns out, Tim Keller’s “The Reason for God” (2008), the book recommended by my friend, is the best of the “Mere Christianity” wannabes. Mr. Keller argues that the usual objections to Christianity—that it is a straitjacket, that there cannot be just one true religion—are themselves the product of a particular (secular Western) point of view. He then builds an affirmative case for Christianity, suggesting that the Big Bang and our appreciation of beauty are clues pointing to God and that Christ’s resurrection was so unlikely both to Greeks and Romans (who viewed the material world as weak and corrupt) and to Jews (who expected any resurrection to come at the end of time) that it cannot be dismissed as the clever marketing strategy of a new religion. If this sounds a little like N.T. Wright, it isn’t accidental: Mr. Keller draws liberally from him, as well as Lewis, Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga (a professor at Notre Dame) and others. “The Reason for God” is as sensible and winsome as one would expect from the pastor of a latticework of churches that draw more than 5,000 attendees in New York City every Sunday, most of them young, single, urban professionals. But it too is no “Mere Christianity.” It does not have the original arguments or the magical prose of Lewis’s classic.’ (David Skeel, Wall Street Journal • 2008 08 15)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn: the line within: ‘Solzhenitsyn was far from endorsing the thesis of the “banality of evil” as Hannah Arendt had expounded it. Nor did he see totalitarianism as the ultimate source of the evil that it promotes. Rather totalitarian government is the great mistake, made for whatever noble or ignoble purpose, of putting the final goal before the present dilemma. It is this which gives evil intentions the same chance as good ones, which enables the criminal and the psychopath to compete on a level with the saint and the hero. Yet even in totalitarianism the evil belongs to the human beings, and not to the system. This is the remarkable message that Solzhenitsyn, crawling from the death-machine, carried pressed to his heart.’ (Senior Fellow Roger Scruton, in openDemocracy • 2008 08 11)

Atheism and Evil: Could it possibly improve things to believe that the long pain of human evolution was set in motion by chance alone? The atheist view of the world is actually rather bleaker than that of Jews and Christians: Suffering under the weight of evil is meaningless, and so is any struggle against evil. Everything in the atheist’s world begins and ends in randomness and chance. Few atheists seem to be as rigorously honest as Friedrich Nietzsche, who warned that if God is dead, it is wishful thinking to hold that reason alone can confer “meaning” on life. Reason has been outmoded by chance. (Michael Novak, First Things: On the Square • 2008 07 29)

• Christopher Nolan’s Achievement: The Dark Knight (2008 07 22)
• Unplanned Parenthood (2008 07 21)
• What makes a supervillain? (2008 07 19)
• Pope’s Speech at Barangaroo (2008 07 17)
• Hollywood’s Hero Deficit (2008 07 17)