By: Pam Lau on February 28, 2023
In his memoir, A Thousand Days, former Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger reproached himself for not objecting during the planning for the Bay of Pigs invasion: “I can only explain my failure to do more than raise a few timid questions by reporting that one’s impulse to blow the whistle on this nonsense was simply undone by…
By: Andy Hale on February 28, 2023
Occasionally, a book hits the zeitgeist at just the right time with the right words. Over the last several years, Tod Bolsinger’s Canoeing the Mountain and Tempered Resilience have been those books for church leaders. But if you talk to Tod, which I have on two occasions for the CBF Conversations Podcast (first interview and second interview), he’d tell you that…
By: Kayli Hillebrand on February 27, 2023
Ronald Heifetz and his co-authors Alexander Grashow and Marty Linsky had me at the subtitle of The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: “Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World.” Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky all lead Cambridge Leadership Associates, a leadership development firm that spans international borders and sectors of industry. Having additional experience…
By: Scott Dickie on February 27, 2023
We might be able to get through life, “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (1) but there’s only one way to read Kahneman’s book: slow. I found this book full of interesting facts buried in an over-abundance of words—often descriptions of various research experiments—which made the book difficult to read. Having said that, the overall assertion—that we…
By: Travis Vaughn on February 27, 2023
If I’m truthful, I think I’d say I really like working alone. Not all the time, of course. But a lot of the time. In fact, I’m pretty happy running a small business as my side hustle, in partnership with my wife, with no other employees. Wait. Pause. That might be my “remembering self,”[1] taking…
By: Jennifer Vernam on February 27, 2023
I was struck by the continuation of a theme from last week’s reading of Edwin Friedman[1] to this week in David Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow.[2] I am going to try to show how I wove the concepts of Friedman’s non-anxious leadership and Kahneman’s System 1 and 2 thinking together. Last week, in the online…
By: Laura Fleetwood on February 26, 2023
The place where your feet meet the ground matters. In an age where a large part of our communication and information appears on digital screens from all over the world, it’s easy to forget the importance of the geographical environment in our daily lives. Two books that remind us of the power of place are…
By: Daron George on February 26, 2023
“The Map That Changed the World” is a book written by Simon Winchester and published in 2001. The book tells the story of William Smith, a 19th-century English geologist who created England and Wales’s first geological map, changing how people thought about the Earth’s history. The book describes Smith’s life, his early career as a…
By: Jean de Dieu Ndahiriwe on February 25, 2023
In Prisoners of Geography, Tim Marshall shares several ideas, and as I read the book question remains whether there will ever be peace on this side of heaven. I found this book interesting and will look at a few key ideas. My main takeaway is that, as suggested in his title, we might all be prisoners…
By: Chad McSwain on February 25, 2023
Have you ever considered that maps, or more precisely, the ground beneath you influences how you think? Without a doubt, we take the ground and maps for granted. We live in an age of pocket GPS that guides family road trips and gives accurate milage and minutes to the nearest McDonalds, yet this is a…
By: Jenny Steinbrenner Hale on February 25, 2023
Maps. They tell us the mysteries of the ground upon which we walk. They also highlight the strategies humans have used to mold and shape their lives in their front and backyards, according to their topography, throughout history. I have always loved maps and associate them with new adventures, unique learnings about the world, trail…
By: Jonathan Lee on February 24, 2023
Tom Holland, the author of Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, is a British writer who wrote novels and historical non-fiction books on topics of classical and medieval history. In Dominion, Tom analyzes the rise and impact of Christianity on the western world. He divides the book into three parts – Antiquity, Christendom, and…
By: Kally Elliott on February 24, 2023
There is a member of our family who we all, and I do mean ALL of us, allow to set the agenda. She is needy, definitely the most anxious member of the family, afraid of her own shadow, and constantly demanding attention. Always watching, following us from room to room, she is undifferentiated and fully…
By: Denise Johnson on February 24, 2023
It is not hard to see that we no longer live in a Christian dominated society. The fluidity of thought, values, and the definition of what is right and wrong changes so quickly it is hard to keep up. All the while there is one group or another crying out that their human rights have…
By: Esther Edwards on February 23, 2023
All through history people have not only lived out their faith, but they have died for their faith with conviction and hope. In so many cases, death could have been easily avoided by simply accepting a “lesser Jesus”, accepting him to be one god of many gods. Gerald L. Sittser, in his book, “Waters from…
By: Jenny Dooley on February 23, 2023
I approached Edwin Friedman’s book, Failure of Nerve, with a great deal of curiosity and a fair amount of apprehension. I am quite familiar with the practice of non-anxious presence discussed in his book and yet I notice myself faltering in certain anxiety prone situations. In my attempts to restore equilibrium and balance I…
By: Scott Dickie on February 23, 2023
I was particularly interested in reading Friedman’s Failure of Nerve for two reasons: First, it is another book in our reading list that is specifically related to leadership (see previous post on Leadersmithing). Second, my daughter recently committed to a university to play volleyball and her future coach named A Failure of Nerve as one…
By: Nicole Richardson on February 23, 2023
Humanism adheres to the understanding that each human has value and dignity; because of that inherent value humans have no need of religion to define what is moral/ethical/good. Humans can be good without God. Postmodern thinkers push back on the “one truth” because one’s experience is more revelatory to define one’s truth; truth is relative. …
By: Troy Rappold on February 23, 2023
In his 2019 book, Dominion, author Tom Holland attempts to explain how Christianity became “the most powerful hegemonic cultural force in the history of the word” (p. xxv). It is not a history of Christianity per se, but rather he seeks “to explore how we in the West came to be what we are, and…
By: Pam Lau on February 23, 2023
I was a young adult, eager and enthusiastic, with my first experience of anxiety. Maybe 19? Maybe 20? The memory is still blurred. But I remember the thinning of my feelings as my heart palpitated wildly beneath my chest, the involuntary panic that I would never want another soul to know I carried around in…
