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.
Dallas Willard, a Christian philosopher at the University of Southern California, says smart people get blinded to their own immoral actions because “an unsatisfied desire is the time bomb that ticks away in a person.”
Over time, he says, high achievers with considerable autonomy find the forces staving off their desires for money, sex, or power “begin to fall away.”
To keep at bay such festering passions, Willard says, people need firm resolve to pursue “the good that flows from their function” in life, such as providing a worthy service to the public through a business enterprise. Such resolve, he says, depends on a deep certainty about what is right and wrong.
“One of the things that’s come up over and over about George Bush is that he is too certain,” Willard says. “We all know that that’s a possibility, but usually people don’t look at the other side in terms of what uncertainty does. . . . If you can make up stories for The New York Times [as former reporter Jayson Blair did] and get by with it, why not? That sort of behavior is not a reflection of too much moral certainty. That’s the result of something very different.”
It stems instead, Willard suggests, from a worldview that sees no moral absolutes.
In Willard’s view, a single confidant rather than an entire network can be sufficient to keep a successful person morally grounded, especially when coupled with a regular, private journaling habit.
He urges those in authority to write daily on two questions: “When have I served the good of my function [as a family member or professional, for instance]? And when have I served myself?”
Sightings, Character and Ethics, Leadership, Wed 06 Jul 2005
I fear, wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion. Therefore, I do not see how it is possible, in the nature of things, for any revival of religion to continue long. For religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and love of the world in all its branches.
John Wesley
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Religion, Politics, and Public Opinion
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The Rise of Global Civil Society: Building Communities and Nations from the Bottom Up by Don Eberly.
A sweeping and hopeful overview of the extraordinary new forces that are prying open closed societies and cultivating democratic norms across the globe.
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)
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Life’s Living Toward Dying: A Theological and Medical-Ethical Study by Vigen Guroian.
Guroian evokes a classical Christian understanding of "living toward dying" as antidote both to denial of death and to its too-eager embrace of purely technical truth.
