By: Jay Forseth on October 25, 2018
(Map with China “at the center” which was discussed in our Hong Kong advance) I grimaced when I read the words “New History” in our book’s title this week. Do those two words even go together? I must admit my attitude was immediately skeptical towards The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by…
By: Chris Pritchett on October 25, 2018
What is “the axis on which the world spins?” What is the center of the world? This is really the driving question of Peter Frankopan’s monumental international bestseller: The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. Frankopan set out to write the history of the world from Antiquity to 2014—what an enormous feat to…
By: Mike on October 25, 2018
Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads is an old-world history book, told under modern contexts, about how East meets West and eventually became globalized. This post will attempt to connect Frankopan’s historical treatise with my dissertation research. I will look for associations that will help strengthen my research question that uses Biblical solutions to help prepare,…
By: Jean Ollis on October 25, 2018
Geopolitics: a study of the influence of such factors as geography, economics, and demography on the politics and especially the foreign policy of a state[1] Peter Frankopan admittedly was inspired to write his text based on the current state of geopolitics.[2] He aims to challenge the paradigm of “our” western view of history, specifically to challenge assumptions about…
By: Mark Petersen on October 25, 2018
First off, I loved this book. Not only was it written by a historian (my undergrad major), he was taking a contrarian view that brings a fresh and much-needed counterpoint to the traditional “accepted and lazy history of civilization … where Ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the…
By: Rhonda Davis on October 25, 2018
When I was growing up, members of my church hosted a “progressive dinner” every Christmas. Those who had the most elaborately decorated homes would host portions of the dinner. Appetizers would be at the first home, soup and salad at the next, entrée at the third, ending with a dessert buffet at the fourth home.…
By: Tammy Dunahoo on October 25, 2018
Bayard’s How to Talk About a Book You Haven’t Read and Adler’s How to Read a Book became irrelevant when approaching the potent twenty-four-page work of Richard Paul and Linda Elder, Critical Thinking Concepts & Tools. The words were few but packed with truly societal changing possibilities that took this reader on a journey of…
By: Colleen Batchelder on October 25, 2018
Diversity is not simply a subset of culture, but a dialect of nuance, perspective and narrative. It is the pen by which men and women express their story and expose their truth. The English playwright, Edward Bulwer-Lytton captured this beautifully when he stated, “The pen is mightier than the sword.”[1] Peter Frankopan, historian and director…
By: Andrea Lathrop on October 25, 2018
I had a counselor and coach who I started meeting with in 2002. He would ask me such difficult questions in our sessions together, usually along the lines of ‘why do you think that is?’ or ‘what do you think about that?’. My default answer was more often than not ‘I don’t know.’ One session…
By: Sean Dean on October 25, 2018
I grew up in a town on the coast of Maine. The majority of the people in my community were Quebecois, immigrants or children of immigrants from the Canadian province of Quebec. This fact made it so that our city was very white and not just because of the mounds of snow that would fall…
By: Jennifer Williamson on October 25, 2018
As I leafed through the pages of Peter Frankopan’s, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, my mind was elsewhere. This weekend, for the first time since our arrival in France eight and a half years ago, we will be hosting a short-term team from our home church in Spokane, WA. I’ve instructed…
By: Harry Edwards on October 24, 2018
“I wonder…” Those words shared by Dr. Jason Clark was meant to convey a particular posture in how we study and learn. I forget exactly the context in which it was shared, but it was one of his talks meant to encourage our cohort to hold our ideas, thoughts and learnings loosely. The memory still…
By: Jake Dean-Hill on October 24, 2018
As I painfully trudged through Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, it was interesting to learn about his new take on the history of the world. He claims…“From the beginning of time, the centre of Asia was where empires were made. The alluvial lowlands of Mesopotamia, fed by the Tigris…
By: Digby Wilkinson on October 24, 2018
Wahoo. After learning how to read (Adler), and then not read (Bayard), and then to synthesise what we have or haven’t read in some useful way (Rowntree), we now get to think about what we have or haven’t read, in a critical way (Elder). So, after zipping through Paul and Linda Elder’s Critical Thinking: Concepts…
By: Dave Watermulder on October 24, 2018
Some months ago, I was visiting a woman from my congregation in the hospital. She had undergone an emergency procedure and she was recovering in the ICU. By the time I visited her, she was feeling much better, sitting up in her bed and looking ahead to a full recovery. She was told she would…
By: Rev Jacob Bolton on October 24, 2018
Egocentric thinking results from the unfortunate fact that humans do not naturally consider the rights and needs of others…We do not naturally recognize our egocentric assumptions, the egocentric way we use information, the egocentric way we interpret data, the source of our egocentric concepts and ideas, the implications of our egocentric thought. We do not…
By: Kyle Chalko on October 20, 2018
William A. Dyrness’ book Visual Faith: Art, Theology, and Worship in Dialoguge is in a unique category. Not many people can engage with theology and art in current culture as thoroughly as Dyrness did. Many theologians might do art, or some artist might implement some theology but Dyrness approaches the topic with authority and with…
By: Trisha Welstad on October 20, 2018
As I write this blog, my house is full of artists: Musicians, song-writers, singers, creatives. Fifteen plus women and men from the Northwest and beyond, creating music in a retreat setting over three days. Four production spaces are set with groups of three to five people at each. The groups have eight hours to write…
By: Nancy VanderRoest on October 19, 2018
So…what’s the point? Why would anyone write a book about telling someone else about ways to study? Rowntree noted that he didn’t write the book to tell anyone how to study, but instead to introduce various ways of learning. Yup, that makes it clear as mud! Sometimes, books really hold little meaning, as noted in…
By: Jay Forseth on October 19, 2018
Cohort LGP8’s Mark Peterson, in a former Zoom chat session, made a comment that I have not easily forgotten. I won’t get the wording exactly right, but he referred to aesthetic beauty enhancing worship–like stained glass, church architecture, and other scenic surroundings. I believe I remember him saying he wished we would return to more…
