Reviews
Book and Film Reviews
A Respectful Approach to Leadership Development
Thu 21 Feb 2008 by Fred Harburg
Designed for Life by Arthur F. Miller. Life (n) Media, LLC, 2007, 328pp., $25.
With the precision of a surgeon and the tenacity of a trial lawyer, befitting his origins, Arthur Miller builds the case for a unifying theory of persons in his provocative book, Designed for Life. This book provides a wake-up call to all who are involved in any human resource job and, more importantly, to leaders who make daily decisions regarding the hiring, placement, and career moves of people. Miller’s reverence for the dignity of each human life and for the Creator of the miraculous panoply of gifts and talents resident in humankind provides a stirring call to arms for leveraging diversity in the most profound sense of the word.
The prevailing wisdom with respect to selection in most organizations is the fundamentally flawed idea that people can be molded and “developed” by an organization to be whatever the organization needs them to be. This position represents extreme organizational hubris, defies practical observation of the nature of human beings, and is enormously disrespectful of the uniquely valuable people who make up an organization’s workforce.
What Do Evangelicals Do with Power?
Fri 01 Feb 2008 • Responses: 3 • by David W. Miller
Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite, by D. Michael Lindsay, Oxford University Press (2007).
Some books have the good fortune of being well timed and well written. Faith in the Halls of Power is one of those books. For those familiar with or maybe even a part of the American evangelical world, little in this book will surprise you, though its depth and breadth will impress you. For those who are not familiar with or a part of the American evangelical world, you might find the contents both jarring and comforting.
It is jarring, because Lindsay documents well the deep and successful engagement by evangelicals in the elite leadership ranks of virtually all strategically important spheres of modern society, including politics, the academy, the corporate world, and the arts. It is comforting, because most of the evangelicals Lindsay describes belie the negative stereotypical image of evangelicals held by many progressives, liberals, mainliners, and secularists. Lindsay’s evangelicals are not the narrow-minded, judgmental, backward, bellicose voices sometimes caricatured by today’s cultural elites. Rather, they are smart, savvy, and worldly, participating in and quietly trying to change the system from within, not withdrawing from the world or merely casting stones from the sidelines.
The World of Total Work
Thu 06 Sep 2007 by Dan Russ
Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper, Translated by Gerard Malsbary with an introduction by Roger Scruton (St. Augustine’s Press [1948] 1998), $12.
Work is consuming our lives and—Josef Pieper would say—our humanity. I have recently observed cases of two disturbing instances of what Pieper calls the “world of total work.” The first is among friends and colleagues who are wired for vacations. By this I mean that they either choose or are expected to take their cell phones and laptops with them on vacations. They do so either because they are concerned about what their superiors or colleagues would think if they ignored the demands of the office, or because they fear missing something or someone that might be crucial to their professional lives. Indeed, a friend recently observed that as she and her husband take their annual pilgrimage to the shore, each year the beaches and coffee shops are increasingly filled with people on cell phones and laptops, doing business.
A Theology of Safeway
Wed 18 Jul 2007 • Responses: 2 • by Micah Mattix
A book with theory and case studies on a fresh way to understand and engage the culture we live in.
Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Charles A. Anderson, and Michael J. Sleasman, Everyday Theology: How to Read Cultural Texts and Interpret Trends, Baker Academic, March 2007. 288 pages, $24.
What do the contents of the Safeway checkout line tell us about our culture’s definition of that long-standing Socratic notion, “the good life”? What do Eminem’s sometimes bombastic rap songs tell us about current notions of despair and redemption? How does one relate these definitions to the ones found in the Scriptures? More importantly, why should one bother?
Room for God at Work?
Thu 05 Apr 2007 by C. William Pollard
David W. Miller, God at Work: The History and Promise of the Faith at Work Movement, Oxford University Press, November 2006, Hardcover, 232 pages, ISBN 0195314808.
In our diverse and pluralistic society, is there room for God at work? Are there not some lessons from history or societal norms that provide good reason for separating the sacred from the secular? What is there in common between the labor of my work, the profit I seek in my business, and the God I worship on Sunday?
In his recent book, God at Work, David Miller, executive director of the Center for Faith and Culture at Yale, responds to these questions and more as he provides an extensive review of the development and history of the faith-at-work movement and discusses the implication of its growing acceptance and potential value for the way we do business and the way we live and relate to each other.
Faith in the Creator God in Ancient China?
Wed 07 Mar 2007 • Responses: 6 • by David Aikman
Faith of Our Fathers: God in Ancient China, by Chan Kei Thong with Charlene L. Fu, Beijing: Dong Fang Publishing House/China Publishing Group, 327 pp., ISBN 7801865065, $23.10 (This book may be purchased through the authors’ website)
Two and a half centuries ago a stormy dispute surged through the Christian world about the nature of China’s culture. In Rome, the Catholic Church was deeply divided over the nature of Chinese culture. Did the ancient Chinese, long before they encountered Buddhism, Christianity, or Islam, have an understanding of God in a monotheistic sense as creator and sustainer of the universe? The Jesuits, who had an intellectually brilliant and profound impact on China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thought they did. So, two centuries later, did Rev. James Legge, translator of the Chinese classics into English and a deep admirer of Confucius. But in the eighteenth century, Dominican and Franciscan opponents of the Jesuits, who distrusted the confident Jesuit influence within the Chinese imperial court, disagreed noisily. Ancient Chinese beliefs, they said, were so many pagan superstitions, and needed to be discarded by prospective Chinese converts to Catholicism. Legge’s opponents took the same position, and were only partially deflected in their opposition to his views because the Scottish clergyman was so brilliant that he became Oxford University’s first professor of Chinese.
What to Make of China?
Fri 02 Feb 2007 • Responses: 1 • by Richard W. Ohman
Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power by David Aikman (Second edition, Regnery Publishing, December 2006), 336 pages. ISBN 1596980257
China—what to make of it? Response to this question will undoubtedly consume an ever-increasing amount of time, energy, and analysis as our new century unfolds. The context for discussing this question is becoming clear and involves at least three major themes: economic potential, political rigidity, and the nation’s soul. David Aikman’s book, Jesus in Beijing, just released in a new edition, addresses the least-discussed of these today—the nation’s soul—which may well be the most important in answering the questions about China and its future.
Reconnecting Spirituality and Knowledge
Thu 30 Nov 2006 by Mark D. Filiatreau
Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology by Eugene Peterson. Grand Rapids: Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2005. 368 pages, including back matter.
“There comes a time for most of us when we discover a deep desire within us to live from the heart what we already know in our heads and do with our hands. But ‘to whom shall we go?’” —Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places
It is a commonplace that Christian spirituality is not what it used to be. Then again, it never was—just read Paul’s letters to Corinth for a reminder. Nevertheless, each age has its particular challenges. The besetting problem for Christians in the industrialized West has long been a valorization of propositional knowledge and restless activity at the expense of other movements of the soul such as imagination, love, silence, and desire. Indeed, this privileging of the acquisition of knowledge is at the expense of “knowing” itself, as the word is meant in the Bible. Such an emphasis is a key to why the integrity and power that so radically changed the Roman Empire has long been missing—and it is the Evangelical wing of the church in North America that I’m talking about.
Redeeming the Tongue
Tue 14 Nov 2006 by T. M. Moore
Conversation: A History of a Declining Art, by Stephen Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 368 pages. ISBN 0300110308
Anyone who has ever led a discussion group knows how difficult it can be to get people to engage in conversation. Even when the focus is clear—as in a book group or Bible study—and materials have been handed out in advance, the discussion leader can feel like a dentist working without anesthetic as he yanks and tugs to pull out of the mouths of his participants some contribution for the group’s betterment.
Whereas the Scriptures mightily prize the power of the spoken word, few of the followers of Christ seem to care much about mastering those conversational techniques that could enable them to employ the gift of the tongue to edify, enlighten, delight, direct, challenge, and entertain one another. Our conversation is lacking. And in this, as Stephen Miller points out, we are but a reflection of the larger society of which we are a part.
On Not Leaving Theology to the Professionals
Thu 12 Oct 2006 by Peter Edman
Lesslie Newbigin: Missionary Theologian: A Reader, compiled and introduced by Paul Weston (Eerdmans/SPCK, 2006, ISBN 0802829821); 264 pages plus notes, bibliography, and index.
Since Provocations is directed in large part to business and professional leaders you may wonder why our first formal book review is about theology. The reason is that all of us, consciously or not, are theologians, and as Andrzej Turkanik said at a recent emerging leaders forum, the question is, what kind of theologians are we?
Most of us tend to leave the deep thinking to the “professionals,” and as Lesslie Newbigin says, “Theology has been largely the preserve of clergy and academics.” He said this as a challenge to the average follower of Jesus, reminding us that we have a deeper responsibility than we sometimes wish to acknowledge. We must not be satisfied with a superficial understanding and there are significant dangers when you leave everything to the professionals. We thus start with this collection of writings of the great missionary bishop and theologian who died in 1998, for it offers a framework for the type of approach we will often take.
