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Steven Sample: On the Supertexts

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Make a list of all the texts in the whole world which are four hundred years old or more and are still widely read today. The first five are easy: the Judeo-Christian Bible, the Qur'an, the Bhagavad Gita, the Pali Canon of Buddhism, and the analects of Confucious. Then, in rapid sucession, nearly everyone agrees to include: Plato's Republic Aristotle's Politics the plays of Shakespeare the plays of Sophocles Dante's Divine Comedy Homer's Illiad and Odyssey Montaigne's Essays Cervantes's Don Quixote Machiavelli's The Prince. After that, consensus becoes more difficult to achieve. . .The point is not whether the list contains twelve or twenty-four or even fifty entries; rather, the point is that the list is extremely short. Think of it: of all the hundreds of thousands of books, essays, poems, letters, plays and histories that were composed four hundred years ago or more, only a dozen or two are still widely read today. . .these supertexts ...
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Edwin Friedman: The Problem with Leadership

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A friend recommended the book Failure of Nerve  by Edwin H. Friedman  especially for the pastoral ministry. I've not been one to focus on family systems theory, but this books, as it pertains to leadership, has really given wonderful, and in my view, undeniable, nuggets of wisdom. The subtitle says it all for me: "Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix." I present here some quotes from the introduction and a few helpful charts.
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Edwin Friedman: A Society in Regression

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The following is from Edwin Friedman's Book The Failure of Nerve. It is an expanded look at Chapter Two - A Society in Regression. All of the below are excerpts with page numbers listed. A Society in Regression My thesis here is that the climate of contemporary America has become so chronically anxious that our society has gone into an emotional regression that is toxic to well-defined leadership. Five characteristics of chronically anxious [families and societies]: Reacitivity: the vicious cycle of intense reactions of each member to events and to one another. Herding: a process through which the forces for togetherness triumph over the forces for individuality and move everyone to adapt to the least mature members. Blame displacement: an emotional state in which family members focus on forces that have victimized them rather than taking responsibility for their own being and destiny. A quick-fix mentality: a low threshold for pain that constantly seeks symptom relief rather t...
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