Musings

In my last Musing (“If You are the ‘Boss,” How do you Lead”?), I presented a case for a collaborative approach to leadership, in sharp contrast to a top-down leadership style. The more in-depth analysis that follows includes my elaboration on these two styles of leadership. As in my last Musing, I will focus on […]

My experience is that attempts at conversations about the future of Democracy in America are significantly hampered by lack of clarity as to the meaning of two controversial words, “liberalism” and “antiliberalism.” Therefore, I first need to make clear what I believe those two words mean, drawing heavily on the splendid recent book by Robert […]

The values that I seek to foster on a daily basis reflect my understanding of God’s redemptive purposes on earth. I believe that as a “follower of Jesus,” I should seek to “partner with God” toward the realization of these purposes, which, in a manner that I cannot begin to comprehend, will be “fully realized” […]

For my new Musings into the near future, I will often  follow a pattern of posting two back-to-back Musings that are inter-related. The first Musing will be directed primarily to users of social media; it will be relatively brief, using “popular language” that can easily and quickly digested. The follow-up Musing will be geared to […]

In our increasingly polarized and tribalistic culture, the desire to exert power over others is rampant. I point my readers to two examples. In the political realm, it appears that many politicians will do most anything to get elected to legislative office, or re-elected once in office. Why is that? It is my belief that […]

In the pietistic Lutheran sub-culture into which I was born and raised, we were led to believe in a very narrow view of God’s Redemptive purposes: God only wishes to redeem individual persons. In 1972 I began to seriously question that narrow view of redemption during a sabbatical leave while teaching mathematics at The King’s […]

I recently had the delightful experience of reading a book that beautifully captured a number of my deeply held beliefs about the nature of my commitment to the Christian faith. Especially gratifying was the fact that the author, Gerald L. Sittser, and I served together as members of the administration at Northwestern College in Iowa […]