By: Jenny Dooley on March 13, 2024
Reading Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias by Dr. Pragya Agarwal, is a reflective process. It’s uncomfortable discussing bias due to my intersecting identities as a Caucasian American woman. I’m feeling awkward acknowledging the unconscious bias I experience as a female and as a former expatriate, while simultaneously feeling regretful of my unintentional biases. I’m painfully aware…
By: Shela Sullivan on March 12, 2024
“Prove it through the alignment between your words and your actions. Prove it by standing up for what’s right. Prove it through measurable tangible signs of progress. Prove it through your own experience. Prove it through your phenomenal successes. Prove it through your glorious failures. And prove it all on these three levels: Prove it…
By: Diane Tuttle on March 12, 2024
Throughout this semester we have been looking at leadership from the different lenses of selected authors. This week Simon Walker brings the Undefended Leader to our attention in his book Leading Out of Who You Are, Discovering the Secret of Undefended Leadership. Essentially, the undefended leader is someone who leads out of who they are…
By: Glyn Barrett on March 12, 2024
When I was 12, I started High School in Australia. My Father was the pastor of the local Pentecostal Church, and the opening of the magnificent new church premises[1] coincided with my first weeks in a new school. The new church was the talk of the small town. It was front-page news and seemingly the…
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: Jeff Styer on March 11, 2024
Twenty-three years ago, my wife and I were given a leadership goal, and this goal was repeated three times, successfully raise this child to adulthood. As the Venn diagram shows, everyone in the family can agree upon the same goal. For us as parents (leaders) that goal gives us a vision for how we…
By: Tim Clark on March 11, 2024
There’s a person I get to occasionally do work with who thinks that they are right about almost everything. This otherwise smart, reasonable, capable, and pleasant to be with human being simply can’t back down when their perspective is being challenged. As I’ve considered the reason this may be the case, I believe it’s a…
By: Kim Sanford on March 11, 2024
Three days ago, I picked up Sway by Pragya Agarwal.[1] I began reading, and by page 35 I knew what I wanted to write my blog post about. Because I want to keep you in suspense, I’ll come to that in a minute. After the first chapter, I intended to continue with an inspectional read,…
By: Jennifer Vernam on March 11, 2024
In Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias,[1] Pragya Agarwal paints a picture for us of how we are programed to make judgments about others based on how we have been conditioned within our own context.[2] Agarwal asserts that we all have these biases. No one is immune.[3] Much as we learned in RARE leadership,[4] Agarwal encourages that…
By: John Fehlen on March 11, 2024
I came into this blog post knowing that I wanted to title it: “Red and Yellow, Black and White.” If you grew up in the church, or for that matter, didn’t have your head buried in the sand for the entirety of your human existence, you would have [most likely] heard, or at least heard…
By: Christy on March 11, 2024
Earlier in my career, I worked for a logistics company as the director of operations. We were responsible for moving expedited international and domestic cargo, with on-call service 24/7, including holidays. This line of work was exciting for people who enjoy problem solving. There was always a thrill when trying to find a solution to…
By: Travis Vaughn on March 11, 2024
In Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias, Pragya Agarwal wants readers to recognize the urgency of understanding implicit/unconscious bias.[1] Using “‘implicit bias’ and ‘unconscious bias’ interchangeably,”[2] Agarwal defines the terms as “biases that exist without our conscious knowledge, the ones that manifest themselves in our actions and reactions often without us realising it, rearing their heads when…
By: Noel Liemam on March 11, 2024
The reading for this week is challenging for me to read and to comprehend because of the size and the time I have for it. The book by Yascha Mounk, “The Identity Trap,” is broken down in four sections, which are the Origin, the Victory, and the Flaws of Identity Synthesis, and finally the fourth…
By: Mathieu Yuill on March 10, 2024
The concepts outlined in Stephen R. C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault[1], are new to me. In my formal studies and independent reading I hadn’t explored ideas our postmodernism, modernism, the enlightenment era and the like. In fact, the closest I had ever gotten to it was through playing the…
By: Akwese on March 9, 2024
Years ago I was a part of an Intentional Living Community. We came together around our commitment to both God and social justice. To live in the house required us to share a set of core values while also adhere to certain rules and community norms that included things like splitting house chores, rotating who…
By: Dinka Utomo on March 8, 2024
“Where the human knowledge ends, God’s wisdom and power begins to manifest in abundance.” –Gift Gugu Mona- Humans generally like certain things. That’s why most people always try to find certainty in their lives because certainty will bring peace to their hearts. A phrase in Latin reads, “certum est quod certum reddi potest,” which…
By: Elysse Burns on March 8, 2024
The Identity Trap hits a raw nerve. Not because Mounk’s thoughts challenge strongly held convictions, but because I am once again reminded of humanity’s brokenness. We live in a broken world filled with injustice. Dr. Sandra Richter speaks to our fractured reality in Stewards of Eden. She writes, “Yahweh’s world was a world in which…
By: Daren Jaime on March 8, 2024
As my 2-year-old son slept across my chest in our Westchester County apartment, my life would change by this morning. I was awakened by my sister’s call; a plane had hit the World Trade Center. She wanted to know if I got called into work. I usually would work the day shift, but on 9/11,…
By: Esther Edwards on March 8, 2024
“We need and desperately want to make sense of our world: to compose/dwell in some conviction of what is ultimately true.”[1] But what is ultimately true? Can we really know? These questions, steeped in skepticism, form the basis of postmodern thinking. It seems to have set the societal tone in how life, truth, and faith…
By: Kari on March 7, 2024
“He’s the best thing God could ever give to America!” It is a rare moment when I am speechless. It took me a moment to respond. I was at a church speaking to the children about my life in Africa. One of the teachers was telling me of the “horrific” state of America. His comment…
