Category: Biography, Drama, History
By: Tonette Kellett on April 20, 2024
Introduction This week’s reading was Rethinking Leadership: A Critique of Contemporary Theories by Annabel Beerel. This very thick book examines many of the theories we are familiar with and a few we are not. For the purpose of this blog, I will zoom in on the chapter about transformational leadership. This is where my own…
By: Tonette Kellett on April 14, 2024
Introduction Our readings this week were two-fold by Carl Trueman. The first book I read through was The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution. [1] This was an exhaustive look at the sexual revolution, going back not merely to the 1960s but over two hundred…
By: Tonette Kellett on April 6, 2024
Introduction This week, I read Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland. Although it was a huge book, it was an interesting read. Holland explains that his book explores what made Christianity so “subversive and disruptive” and how it saturated the West so that many of its “good and ill instincts…
By: Tonette Kellett on March 21, 2024
Cut Flowers of Morality I decided to watch a few videos after reading Matthew Petrusek’s book Evangelization and Ideology this week. One in particular was very interesting as it featured so many of our authors. This video opened with a story by Petrusek about morality in our society today, or the lack thereof. He used…
By: Erica Briggs on March 14, 2024
When I was a child, I used to sing. My mother was my manager, booking gigs at local bars and theaters. I sang a range of musical arrangements from the blues (Billie Holiday’s “Good Morning Heartache) to pop (Donna Summer’s “On the Radio” – I was actually wheeled out on stage sitting on a giant…
By: Tonette Kellett on March 11, 2024
Introduction This week’s book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning by Nigel Biggar, partly argued that the British Empire and its colonies never intended to cause harm. In fact, their intentions were primarily good. [1] In addition to the book, I viewed an interview with this author. He delineated four areas in which the British “got it…
By: Erica Briggs on January 30, 2024
If I had to choose between fairy tales and myths, I’d go with fairies – supernatural elementals that wear just the right amount of glitter, and hypnotize with the hope of magic. The stories I am most drawn to are those that take me out of myself, away from the realities of living in my…
By: Tonette Kellett on December 10, 2023
Nassim Taleb’s book Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder was a challenging read for me this past week, perhaps because it’s the end of the semester for both doctoral work and my job at school. I’m pressured to finish my assignments, give and grade semester exams myself, and so on. Then there is this very…
By: Tonette Kellett on November 22, 2023
The Scandal of Leadership by J.R. Woodward merges the works of three primary thinkers, among others. The first is Walter Wink and The Powers That Be and Unmasking the Powers, which discuss the theology of the principalities and powers of the world in which we live. Rene Girard’s book Mimetic Theory deals with mimetic desire and…
By: Tonette Kellett on November 21, 2023
Spell Bound is the second book our cohort has read by the author Daniel Lieberman. The first was The Molecule of More. Lieberman spent over twenty years studying Carl Jung before sitting down to write the book Spell Bound. As he thought about the philosophers and great writers down through the centuries he had read…
By: Tonette Kellett on November 20, 2023
Maps of Meaning by Jordan Peterson is a book that is foundational in the area of how we, as humans, make meaning from stories. We derive meaning from the world around us, which enables us to live in the manner in which we choose. [1] In this book, the author explores how we formulate maps…
By: Tonette Kellett on November 2, 2023
The book, The Sound of Leadership: Kingdom Notes to Fine Tune Your Life and Influence, was written by Jules Glanzer. According to his Linked-In profile, he is a senior consultant for the Timothy Group, which does leadership training for young men. [1] He served as President of Tabor College, a private Mennonite college in Kansas,…
By: Tonette Kellett on October 26, 2023
Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault by Stephen Hicks, to be honest, was a difficult book for me to read this week. It was long, and the print was tiny, and the topic was not one of my favorites to read about, to be perfectly frank. [1] To help me along the…
By: Tonette Kellett on October 19, 2023
Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination by Vincent Lloyd was an interesting read for me this week. It was one of those books that I read cover to cover because I wanted to capture all that it was saying. As I reflect now on the writing, there are some aspects of the book that I…
By: Tonette Kellett on October 12, 2023
In the book, Rare Leadership: 4 Uncommon Habits for Increasing Trust, Joy, and Engagement in the People You Lead, the co-authors Marcus Warner and Jim Wilder collaborate to write about maturity in leadership. [1] They have come up with the acronym R.A.R.E. to denote the four habits that will cause your emotional intelligence to “soar”,…
By: Tonette Kellett on October 9, 2023
Francis Fukuyama’s book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, was an interesting read for me this past week. It helped make sense for me some of the things going on in our societies today politically both here in the United States and elsewhere overseas. For instance, the hyper-focus of our politicians…
By: Tonette Kellett on September 9, 2023
Simon Walker’s book Leading with Nothing to Lose was very informative this week. It discussed different forces and how they work together in leadership: front stage versus back stage, [1] strong versus weak [2] and expanding versus consolidating [3]. After the introduction of these forces, and how nobody is just one or the other of…
By: Tonette Kellett on September 7, 2023
Artificial Intelligence and ChatGPT are things I know next to nothing about. The videos we watched this week were helpful for me. I decided to download the app on my phone and take it for a spin, just to see what the fuss was all about. I created a prototype of a letter of recommendation…
By: John Fehlen on September 1, 2023
I have friends that have been known to laugh and mock me for reading “touristy” guide books, such as ones by Rick Steves, Lonely Planet, and, a PNW regional favorite travel guide: the late Gerry Frank (whom I personally met at my local grocery store!). The primary reason for their jeering: The Internet. And they…
By: Tonette Kellett on August 20, 2023
In preparing for our trip to Oxford in September, I found the book, The Secret History of Oxford by Paul Sullivan, to be interesting. For instance, I had no idea that Oxford was made up of forty-four colleges. [1] Nor did I truthfully realize until reading through chapters two and three all of the famous…
