By: Denise Johnson on November 4, 2022
Throughout my years of working with children, teens, young adults, and people in various countries, they all want to know the answers to the following questions: Who am I? Where do I belong? What is my purpose?[1] The culture, in which we live today, embraces expressive individualism and sexual identity politics [2] to the extent…
By: Caleb Lu on November 3, 2022
Simon P Walker’s Leading Out of Who You Are is the first in a trilogy of books he writes about what he calls “undefended leadership”. Walker’s main assertion seems to be that undefended leadership is characterized not by knowledge or skill, but by who the leader is and the trust they establish with their followers.…
By: Jenny Steinbrenner Hale on November 3, 2022
Simon Walker’s book, Leading Out of Who You Are, Discovering the Secret of Undefended Leadership, presents a nontraditional approach to leadership and calls people to a transformational journey of self-reflection and discovery.[1] He believes that most leaders operate out of “defendedness,” an attempt to hang onto power by controlling how much of themselves they allow…
By: Jonathan Lee on November 3, 2022
Carl R. Trueman is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College in Pennsylvania and an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. In his recent book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Truman extensively analyzes the modern and ongoing cultural transformation of sexual behaviors and self-identification that Christians face…
By: Tonette Kellett on November 3, 2022
This week’s reading of Leading Out of Who You Are by Simon Walker underlines how vital trust is in leadership. If followers don’t trust their leaders, they simply will not continue to follow. [1] In thinking of this trust relationship, I am naturally put in mind of Native Americans. Recent research says that 66% of…
By: Nicole Richardson on November 3, 2022
Carl Trueman’s book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution offers his thesis that the western culture/society has collapsed as seen by humans’ acceptance and normalization of diversity in sexual identity. Trueman’s argument is tethered to his outline of the journey of history that…
By: Troy Rappold on November 3, 2022
In the 2020 book, “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self,” by Carl Trueman, a comprehensive explanation of humanity’s need for self-identity, and its various manifestations, is thoughtfully explained to the Church. Trueman interprets these self-identity revolutions as “a much deeper and wider revolution in the understanding of what it means to be a…
By: Shonell Dillon on November 3, 2022
I admit that I was super excited when I saw the word anxiety. I immediately thought, “finally something I know something about”. I quickly changed my view as the author reminded the reader that this was not a book about traditional anxiety. It still sparked my interest. At some part I felt as if this…
By: Roy Gruber on November 3, 2022
In The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Carl Trueman delves into a historical and philosophical study of identity. The premise comes early in chapter one, “the underlying argument of this book is that the sexual revolution, and its various manifestations in modern society, cannot be treated in isolation but must rather be interpreted…
By: Henry Gwani on November 3, 2022
Christianity and Christian values are under attack. Seeking to address this disturbing development, Carl Trueman begins his landmark book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by asking how has the current highly individualistic, iconoclastic, sexually obsessed, and materialistic mindset come to triumph in the West? Or, to put the question in a more…
By: Andy Hale on November 2, 2022
“What I offer here is essentially a prolegomenon to many discussions that Christians and others need to have about the most pressing issues of our day, particularly as they manifest themselves in the variety of ways in which the sexual revolution affects us,” argues Carl R. Trueman. In The Rise and Triumph of the Modern…
By: Eric Basye on November 1, 2022
“Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Author Rod Dreher introduces The Rise of Triumph of the Modern Self by connecting to the famous words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He then says, Ordinary Christians need – desperately need – a more profound and holistic grasp of the modern and postmodern condition… The Rise…
By: David Beavis on November 1, 2022
“Why is he seen as a leader?” This was on my mind often when this ministry leader at the megachurch I worked at came to mind. The staff culture possessed a great emphasis on “leadership.” A “strong” leader was taken seriously and had a future within the organization. This particular ministry leader, we’ll call him…
By: Michael Simmons on November 1, 2022
“Indeed, if we strive to be too good we only engender the opposite reaction in the unconscious. If we try to live too much in the light, a corresponding amount of darkness accumulates within.”[1] – John A. Sanford Shadow work is the process of integrating the individual or collective parts that have been largely hidden,…
By: Kristy Newport on November 1, 2022
How then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things? Simon Walker, in his book Leading out of Who You Are, brilliantly “steals like an artist” [1] and adopts Erving Goffman’s theory on human behavior with “the metaphor of a theatre.” [2] He describes people having a front stage where they can present…
By: Sara Taylor Lattimore on October 31, 2022
As a researcher of risk and risk taking capacity. I am always intrigued by studies on why as humans we make the choices we make, what leads us to those choices, and are we willing to take a risk in our choice making. Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow dedicates an entire…
By: Daron George on October 29, 2022
Author Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, covers a lot of material within its five hundred and thirty-three pages. He deals with two different ways of thinking, which he calls system one and system two. System one is our automatic or fast side of thinking, while system two is our more deliberate…
By: Denise Johnson on October 29, 2022
In my reading of Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder,[1]by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, I found myself reflecting of Christ’s call to individuals to follow him. Those invitations were huge steps into the unknown. Steps out of stability and comfort into a lifestyle of risk, and process of transformative, or refined resilience. I cannot help but wonder…
By: Caleb Lu on October 28, 2022
In Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, he speaks to the two systems by which our thinking operates. System 1 (thinking fast), “operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control”[1](20). System 2 (thinking slow), “allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations.”[2](21) Even further,…
By: Elmarie Parker on October 28, 2022
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in “Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder,” offers the reader a literary and philosophical discourse arguing for how best to utilize uncertainty and even chaos to move beyond resilience or robustness to becoming antifragile.[1] In this way, Taleb, who is American-Lebanese, takes the leader-reader beyond Todd Bolsinger’s forge metaphor of developing tempered…
