By: Michael O'Neill on March 7, 2023
Some of you may be familiar with the story, of the “Hippie and the Old Man.” The infamous tale has been used in many sermons over the years and become a staple illustration of God’s love for his people at their core. The message in the story is much more important than whether this event…
By: Kristy Newport on March 6, 2023
Is the Bible gender biased? Are there examples in the Bible which confirm that God does not have a bias among the sexes? I have struggled with these questions and have found hope ultimately in the example Jesus gave in how he treated both sexes when he walked the earth. Reading Pragya Agarwal’s book Sway:…
By: Shonell Dillon on March 6, 2023
Unraveling Unconscious Bias Pragya Agarwal After reading for some time, I turned the book over and noticed that there was a sticker on it that said DC public library. I thought how in the heck did I get a library book? I admit I am a bit cheap when it comes to books that I…
By: Tonette Kellett on March 6, 2023
In Reading Karl Polanyi’s book The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Times, this past week I noted that the author wrote this book in the 1940s. He wrote of the free market system with no government intervention called laissez-faire that was first used in France in the 1800s. [1] He also talked…
By: Jean de Dieu Ndahiriwe on March 5, 2023
As I looked at Polanyi’s work, I saw a troubled sojourner struggling to live a life of impact in a world that is so rapidly changing. Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time is a source of great insights that can help us see more details of the complexity of…
By: Shonell Dillon on March 5, 2023
I spent a great amount of money (that I will not disclose) on season tickets to see the New Orleans Saints. To say that I am a fan is an understatement. If I could I would follow them to each and every game because I love to see my team playing football. I once did…
By: Laura Fleetwood on March 5, 2023
Why are you charging a fee for a guided prayer session? Talking to God should be free.” That message appeared in my DMs after I invited my social media followers to an online guided prayer session I was conducting. In spite of more than 30 people happily paying for the online experience, I never offered…
By: Shonell Dillon on March 4, 2023
Map that Changed the World I choose not to focus on war and land, it is such a sore subject. I choose instead to focus on the man that suffered so greatly to create what the book refers to as “The Map that Changed the World”. I would like to speak to the amount of…
By: Caleb Lu on March 4, 2023
“Do you know ____?” I had a conversation with an old acquaintance that was about 45 minutes of this question in some for or another as they ran through a list of the connections they had made during their time in ministry. It reminded me of conversations around lunch tables at large Evangelical conferences centered…
By: Chad McSwain on March 3, 2023
“All your big givers are going to leave.” That is what an older church member leveraged over the phone one morning – my day off, no less. I had made changes to the music and it was not received well by some. Enter the threat: if you do not change it back then all your…
By: Audrey Robinson on March 3, 2023
The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi is an ambitious, encompassing work to uncover what went wrong with self-regulating markets and the corresponding effects on civilization, especially during the turn of the 19th century. Polanyi was born in 1886 in Vienna and was an economic historian, social theorist, and political economist. He lived through two wars,…
By: Jenny Steinbrenner Hale on March 3, 2023
Says Joseph Stiglitz in the foreword of The Great Transformation, “It is hard and probably wrong, even to attempt to summarize a book of such complexity and subtlety in a few lines.”[1] With that in mind, the following is by no means a summary, but a few themes discovered and a small personal application. Understanding…
By: Michael O'Neill on March 3, 2023
Evangelicalism and capitalism have long been intertwined, but the relationship has shifted dramatically in recent years. For Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and Georg Simmel, the exploration of the institutions of modern capitalism was an important part of their respective social theories, and the neglect of this issue left a void in sociological scholarship during the…
By: Shonell Dillon on March 3, 2023
Tempered Resilence: The author is attempts to explain to us how one becomes a leader after being subjected to challenging circumstances. The author uses the analogy of going through the process of blacksmithing. He explains that those that can stand to go through the tempered times are true leaders. He predicts that those that can…
By: Greg McMullen on March 2, 2023
Reading Polanyi, The Great Transformation I was instantly taken back to political science in community college. I felt a passion start to rise up in where I wanted to dive deeper into Polanyi. In my time in Community College, I became passionate with Karl Marx The Communist Manifesto.[1] John Stuart Mill on Liberty.[2] Jean-Jacques Rousseau,…
By: David Beavis on March 2, 2023
Five years ago, my wife, Laura, and I moved from Southern California to Oregon. This was a dream come true. For years I had the vision of pastoring in the Pacific Northwest. An opportunity presented itself, we packed, and drove north. Dream come true. It wasn’t long after we arrived that the dream became…
By: Becca Hald on March 1, 2023
My husband majored in Business Economics in college and later went on to earn his Master of Business Administration. He loves learning about the concepts in economics and we have talked about these concepts our entire marriage. I understand some of it, but most of it goes over my head and is not exactly one…
By: Kristy Newport on March 1, 2023
Polanyi’s summary In my education, I have not taken a course in economics, so I found Polanyi’s The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time to be arduous reading. It wasn’t until the twenty-first chapter on ‘Freedom in a Complex Society,’ Polanyi’s final words in his historical account, when my mind began…
By: Becca Hald on February 28, 2023
I do not often have the best sense of direction. I grew up in a part of Southern California where the North/South bound 101 freeway travels East to West. I went to college in Santa Barbara where the ocean was to the South messed with my sense of direction. I am eternally grateful for Apple…
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…
