Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis has been read and reviewed in countless outlets from Barnes and Noble to Hearts and Minds Books and the New York Times. There’s a reason why. It’s a well-written memoir describing the circumstances, deep challenges, victories, and struggles of a culture in crisis. This culture has been neglected in popular media…
[This post was originally delivered as a talk at the Faith@Work Summit in Dallas, TX. Read the first post in the series here.] First, all of us, men and women alike, have implicit biases about the performance and roles of men and women. We can see this with a number of studies using a method known as the “Goldberg paradigm.”…
I was recently introduced to an organization called The Fellows Initiative which currently operates programs in 22 cities around the US. A Fellows program is a nine to ten-month spiritual and vocational leadership program that prepares the graduate to live an integrated life of faith. The content presented in the program includes the theology of work, vocation, calling, cultural engagement,…
[This post was originally delivered as a talk at the Faith@Work Summit in Dallas, TX.] I’d like to start with a thought experiment: Imagine that you are about to meet a person for the first time and the only thing you know in advance is that the person is a woman. What words come to mind about that person? In…
America! America! God mend thine every flaw, Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law! –America the Beautiful (Katharine Lee Bates) It had been a long glorious morning full of adrenaline, symbolism, and splendid pomp and circumstance. Then we sang the second stanza of the hymn “America the Beautiful.” Confirming my soul in self-control and confirming my liberty in…
Read part I of this interview here. David Gill: Let me come back to the challenge of being a woman in executive leadership. It seems that many of our faith at work organizations and ministries define themselves as “for men only” even in our time when women are massively present in business schools and the marketplace. Katherine Leary Alsdorf: Prior…
“In corporate industries, we’re all mercenaries,” laughed Ashwin Mathews. “We work for the money. Honest—honest truth! I don’t work for loyalty, right? I’m not loyal to the company. I work for the cash!” I interviewed Ashwin (not his real name) in India in 2012 when I was conducting research for my PhD dissertation in sociology. By that point, I had already…
Eleven years ago Jena Lee Nardella was a graduate from Whitworth College with the dream of eradicating HIV/AIDS and delivering clean water throughout Africa to those who desperately needed it and were dying without it. These dreams, along with the passion and support from Jars of Clay, led to the formation of Blood:Water Mission. I have been familiar with Blood:Water…
Following up on a recent post about the 2016 election as a faith and work crisis, our friends David Gill and Al Erisman passed on this video from CBS News interviewing Mike Rowe about the value of blue-collar work. Food for thought!
By Greg Forster: part four of a series. In my last post I talked about how the underlying theology of dominance paradigm churches leads to practical deism. Here are three specific ways dominance paradigm churches can overcome this: The Past: Dominance paradigm churches overestimate both the moral and religious integrity of the American past. There is, to be sure, much that…
The Green Room 