Do We Have an Extrovert Ideal? (RJS)

May 24, 2012 By RJS 57 Comments

Tuesday morning Scot linked an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education Screening Out Introverts by William Pannapacker. The article is a comment on a new book by Susan Cain Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. From the publisher’s description:

Taking the reader on a journey from Dale Carnegie’s birthplace to Harvard Business School, from a Tony Robbins seminar to an evangelical megachurch, Susan Cain charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal in the twentieth century and explores its far-reaching effects. … She questions the dominant values of American business culture, where forced collaboration can stand in the way of innovation, and where the leadership potential of introverts is often overlooked.

The megachurch Cain refers to in her book is Saddleback, founded and led by Rick Warren. Ch. 2 The Myth of Charismatic Leadership begins with a discussion of Tony Robbins followed by a section on The Harvard Business School and the pros and cons of quick, assertive, charismatic leadership vs quiet methodical decision making. In the last section of the chapter Cain recounts a visit to Saddleback accompanied by Adam McHugh author of Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture.

Since services are just about to start, there is little time to chat. … We head to the main Worship Center where Pastor Warren is about to preach.

… I can’t help but think of Tony Robbins’s “Unleash the Power Within” seminar. Did Tony base his program on megachurches like Saddleback, I wonder, or is it the other way around?

“Good morning, everybody!” beams Skip, who then urges us to greet those seated near us.(p. 67-68)

The megachurch culture, worship form, and values sets up an extroverted atmosphere. Leaders must be extroverts, there is little place for contemplation, conversation (not small talk – real conversation), and deep thinking. Everything is smiles and pleasantries and generalities with a vague avoidance of anything that may get too familiar. It is something like a cross between a trip to Disney World and your local shopping mall.

Is extroversion a virtue or merely a personality trait?

Should extroversion be a trait we value in church leadership?

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Church, Evangelicalism 57 Comments

Why is War So Easy for American Christians?

May 24, 2012 By scotmcknight 29 Comments

This post is by Patrick Mitchel, an Irish theologian teaching in Dublin at Irish Bible Institute.

Being from Europe and writing a post for Jesus Creed, I thought it would be appropriate and interesting to explore European and American attitudes to nationalism and violence. No more feisty conversation partner than Stanley Hauerwas will be found in this one:

In an article called ‘War and the American Difference’ Hauerwas engages with Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age.

Europeans generally are quite reticent about national identity. That they are so Taylor attributes to the experience and memory of the First and Second World Wars that devastated Europe. He observes that war, even wars that seem “righteous,” now make most Europeans uneasy. But that is not the case with Americans. Americans’ lack of unease with war may be, Taylor suggests, because they wrongly think there are fewer skeletons in the American closet when compared to the European closet. Yet Taylor thinks the reason for the American support of war is simpler. “It is easier,” Taylor observes, “to be unreservedly confident in your own righteousness when you are the hegemonic power.”

What do you make of Hauerwas’ call for all Christians to active non-violence?  And his case that America, and many Christians within America, have a troubling lack of unease about going to war?

To Taylor Hauerwas adds this,

I think Taylor does not make articulate — to use one of Taylor’s favorite words — the relationship between American civil religion, our assumption that we are a “religious nation,” and why war for most Americans is unproblematic. War is a moral necessity for America because it provides the experience of the “Unum” that makes the “pluribus” possible. War is America’s central liturgical act necessary to renew our sense that we are a nation unlike other nations. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Public Issues 29 Comments

Our Mutt Language, English

May 23, 2012 By scotmcknight 16 Comments

From Atlantic:

Filed Under: Uncategorized 16 Comments

Authors Putting Down Authors

May 23, 2012 By scotmcknight 8 Comments

I read this post about author put-downs, and it goes on all the time… one of the solutions, and it is not easy to sustain, is to read, review and say positive remarks about authors with whom you disagree. But not all care to be peacemakers. I see some who can’t agree with a thing others say, but if their favorite author said the very same thing they’d stand up and applause.

Go to the link to see quite the list of put-downs.

One man’s Shakespeare is another man’s trash fiction.

Consider this pithy commentary on the Great Bard’s work:

With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare….

But, of course, there must be SOME writers we can all agree on as truly great, right? Like Jane Austen. Or not:

Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Writing & Blogging 8 Comments

Youth and a Theology of Suffering

May 23, 2012 By scotmcknight 11 Comments

This post is by Syler Thomas, a friend of mine who pastors youth in Chicagoland’s suburbs.

Clearly present in Andrew Root’s theology (co-author of The Theological Turn in Youth Ministry with Kenda Creasy Dean) is a focus on the presence of suffering and pain in the world, and God’s connection to it. This is helpful because any youth minister will tell you that ministry to young people will always involve those who are wrestling with those questions.

Do we have this kind of a theology of suffering in our churches today? Do we point people to the crucified Savior as One who can identify with their suffering? What do you think of his assessment of how we handle those who aren’t healed versus those who are?

Root is at his best when he is urging us as youth pastors to probe the darkness, doubt, and difficulty for God’s presence.

On page 82, he says that “theology starts with a crisis, the very crisis of reality itself. The crisis is the fact that you live, that you have a life to live. …The crisis is the very mystery of our existence and the yearning for there to be some kind of meaning to it.” He then continues the crisis language, explaining God’s crucial role in the crisis. On page 86, he states that a “theologically rich ministry begins with inviting young people to articulate what haunts them.” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Youth Ministry 11 Comments

Theologians Thinking with Scientists

May 23, 2012 By scotmcknight 42 Comments

This is the second part of my presentation at BioLogos in March.

Theologians thinking with scientists

Let me give two examples of topics that are probably safer places to begin that practice of pastors and scientists thinking aloud together. My father was an English public school teacher; my church was fundamentalist; I was armed against science on all fronts; so I went into the humanities and put off my Biology and Chemistry classes until the last semester of college, and I should add that my college had a policy – so grades could be calculated – that a graduating senior in good standing had his or her grade determined at the midterm grade, which meant that I really only had to take one half of a semester of science, which gave me more time to read theology and Bible. I learned to think theologically. Then along came one “RJS” who wrote up a post on my blog one day about death entering the world long before Genesis 3, which jolted me not because of evolutionary theory but because I wanted to think about death theologically in that context. My life has not permitted me to chase that one very deep into the tohu va-bohu but I do wonder if the ongoing cycle of life and death over millions of years, red in tooth and claw, is not a sacrament of resurrection and of God as giver and restorer of life – in an ongoing sacramental cycle. Our bright young science students would like to be at the table for this one, and I suspect pastors could say mostly anything they want on this topic and not get in trouble. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Sermon on the Mount 42 Comments

Baseball Nicknames

May 22, 2012 By scotmcknight 18 Comments

Baseball is the best sport for nicknames, and I wonder what you favorite baseball nickname is?

But, here’s an author who thinks nicknames are disappearing:

Imaginative and colorful nicknames for ballplayers, once a baseball staple, are disappearing, going the way of the spitball, the stirrup sock and Sunday doubleheaders.

Boston’s Big Papi and Seattle’s King Felix plus a few others are probably all right, and the Giants do have Kung Fu Panda and The Freak. But overall, today’s nicknames are inferior to the likes of The Meal Ticket, Big Train, The Yankee Clipper, Big Unit, The Flying Dutchman, Iron Horse, The Big Cat, The Grey Eagle and Baby Bull.

Now we are generally reduced to simply cutting off syllables. Usually only one name is shortened: Kruk, Kuip and Boch. Or there is double reduction, such as MadBum, A-Rod and CarGo… [Read more...]

Filed Under: Uncategorized 18 Comments

The Tyranny of Extroversion

May 22, 2012 By scotmcknight 16 Comments

William Pannapacker has an exceptional piece in The Chronicle on recent studies on introversion, but it his opening experience that tells perhaps the whole of the story. As the piece rolls along he sketches some studies, one of which makes this significant observation: “According to Cain, the 19th century valued personal character based on seriousness, discipline, and honor, but the 20th century emphasized personality: selling oneself and being a “mighty likeable fellow.”

What do you see in this narrative? What does it tell us about introversion and extroversion?

Some years ago I joined my students in taking the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a test to determine personality type. It was an assignment in a course I was teaching on vocational exploration.

Assuming there would be an average distribution of results among the 20 students, I planned a series of small-group assignments in which they would discuss their own results for each of the test’s personality dichotomies (e.g., thinking versus feeling). But a problem turned up immediately: Not one student had received an “I” for introversion. Everyone, it seemed, was an extrovert (Myers-Briggs spells it with an “a,” like “extra”). Everyone but me. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Uncategorized 16 Comments

Providential Evolution (RJS)

May 22, 2012 By RJS 38 Comments

The current issue of Books and Culture contains a review of The Language of Science and Faith by Karl Giberson and Francis S. Collins provided by Alvin Plantinga, the John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University Notre Dame. I worked through this book a bit over a year ago (March 2011) and you can find links to the posts in the Science and Faith Archive on the side bar (this one is easy to find as it is the first book on the page). The book by Giberson and Collins is an excellent book – one I would recommend to anyone who is beginning to think through the issues raised by science.

Plantinga’s review is something of a mixed bag, some excellent points mixed in with some not so useful comments and observations, the kinds of comments and misunderstandings I wish we could move beyond. You can (and should) read Plantinga’s review itself, available here. An excellent reflection on Plantinga’s review by David Opderbeck is also worth reading.

Plantinga meanders through a number of different issues that are raised by the intersection of evolutionary biology and the Christian faith. In rather annoying fashion he emphasizes “Darwinism” and separates it from evolution, he doesn’t appear to have read what Giberson and Collins actually wrote at places, rambles off on tangents (like the vitriolic nature of some of the internet world), and throws some asides I would not expect from a scholar of Plantinga’s reputation. As an example of the latter, he notes that many will think Giberson and Collins “a bit unduly sanguine about science” … well yes, that is true, “many” generic persons probably will; but Plantinga appears to endorse that thought and gives little reflection to the fact that Collins is both an expert on evolution and a Christian, while he is a Christian and a philosopher, but quite clearly not an expert on evolution. And then there is the ever annoying “An important feature of science is that it keeps changing in the face of new evidence; this very virtue, however, makes it a bit dicey to invest total confidence in its current deliverances.” While the statement is true in a fashion, it is not true in any way that has bearing on the intersection of science and Christian faith.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Science and Faith 38 Comments

How Pervasive?

May 22, 2012 By scotmcknight 14 Comments

This post is from my friend, Patrick Mitchel, a theologian teaching in Dublin at Irish Bible Institute. Patrick teaches theology in a Story-framework, and I look forward to the day when his theology is in print for all of us to read.

Being from Europe and writing a post for Jesus Creed, I thought it would be appropriate and interesting to explore European and American attitudes to nationalism and violence.

In Ireland we are entering a ‘decade of centenaries’.  In this post I would like to make a general proposal and ask a question of American readers.

The general proposal is this: the story of 20th Century Ireland was shaped and framed by what Walter Wink, following René Girard, called the ‘myth of redemptive violence’. You don’t have to swallow all of Wink’s theology to agree with his main point; the myth of redemptive violence is that violence in the service of the nation is not only necessary, it works; violence is ‘worth it’ and therefore violence is to be remembered, honoured and eulogised within a nationalist narrative.

Questions: How pervasive is the entwining of power, nationalism , violence and religion in America? And how captive is the American church to the idolatry of nationalism (where religion serves the nation as a chaplain to the tribe rather than offering prophetic critique)?

Here are some of the upcoming centenaries in Ireland: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Christianity, Church 14 Comments
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