Kruse Kronicle

Should Christians Participate in Black Friday?

Allan Bevere and I discuss materialism, and Black Friday specifically.

 

Christian Nationalism - Christ AND Caesar?

Here is the August dialog between Allan Bevere and me about Christian nationalism and its implications. 

Calmly Considered: The Demise of Democracy and the Rise of Authoritarianism

In this month's installment, Allan Bevere and I reflect on the rise of authoritarianism in recent years. 

"Democracy is receding in the world and authoritarianism is on the rise. Why is this? What is authoritarianism and what are the circumstances that lead people to trust their futures to authoritarians? How do we recognize authoritarian figures? Is character necessary for good?"

Calmly Considered: How The Church Fails Businesspeople

Last week, I participated with Allan Bevere in a discussion centered on John Knapp's book "How The Church Fails Businesspeople (And What Can Be Done About It)." Discussion focuses on integrating our faith and working lives, with reflection on why that integration is so challenging.

Calmly Considered: Economics, the New Testament, and the 21st Century (in podcast & videocast)

This is the first installment of a once-monthly series called Calmly Considered, in which Allan Bevere and I will be discussing topics related to faith and economics. In this episode, we discuss Peter Oakes'  Empire, Economics, and the New Testament. We barely scratch the surface but hopefully some meaningful dialog. 

Polarity Management Versus Problem Solving

Question. When it comes to breathing, do you prefer inhaling or exhaling?

I have asked this question many times and it always elicits a chuckle. Clearly if you choose one over the other, you end up dead. And if your body decided that this ongoing struggle between inhaling and exhaling was a problem to solved, you would end up dead. Breathing is not a problem to be solved. It is a polarity to be managed.

Polarity management has a much wider application then biology. It applies to a wide range of features in human systems. Economist John McMillian (Stanford) wrote an insightful book called, “Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets.” McMillian makes the case that the never-ending struggle in political economy has been to find the right mix of centralization and decentralization. If power becomes too centralized, then it will become oppressive and destructive. Yet, without centralized power, local tyrants emerge, injustice proliferates, and warring factions square off, sending society into chaos. In this sense, political economy is a polarity to be managed, not a problem to be solved.

Writing in the Atlantic, Eric Liu makes an important observation (emphasis mine):

"We don’t need fewer arguments today; we need less stupid ones.

The arguments in American politics today are stupid in many ways: They’re stuck in a decaying two-party institutional framework; they fail to challenge foundational assumptions about capitalism or government; they center on symbolic proxy skirmishes instead of naming the underlying change; they focus excessively on style and surface.

Americans can do better. Remember: America doesn’t just have arguments; America is an argument—between Federalist and Anti-Federalist world views, strong national government and local control, liberty and equality, individual rights and collective responsibility, color-blindness and color-consciousness, Pluribus and Unum.

The point of civic life in this country is not to avoid such tensions. Nor is it for one side to achieve “final” victory. It is for us all to wrestle perpetually with these differences, to fashion hybrid solutions that work for the times until they don’t, and then to start again.

"America is an Argument." Bingo! I think you will find the same is true in all human structures, including church and family. Part of what facilitates better discussion and arguments is appreciating that we are often wrestling more with polarities and less with virtue and vice.

Politics 2016 and Christian Mission

The Kruse Kronicle byline is, “Contemplating the intersection of work, the global economy, and Christian Mission.” While politics is not the primary focus of this blog, it is impossible to escape how this presidential election is reshaping Christian Mission for substantial segments of American Christianity. In short, we are asking how ought our discipleship shape our political participation?

Before you read further, you should know that I have opposed Donald Trump since he announced back his campaign in June of 2015. My take on policy and priorities leans center right, which should make me lean toward Republicans.  While I have considerable policy disagreements with Trump, that it is not what drives my opposition. My conviction stems from being a disciple of Jesus Christ.

Two days ago on Facebook, I posted a link about Independent Conservative candidate Evan McMullin. He is launching a bid to regain control of the heart and soul of conservatism. I commented, “And the battle for the center-right begins.” A Trump-backing Facebook friend asked:

“Why would anyone vote for a Mormon (non-Christian) candidate [McMullin] while citing the immaturity of Trump's (maturing) Christian faith as a reason not to vote for him?”

I used the occasion of that question to unpack my views. Some friends have encouraged me to post this response in a more accessible forum. So here it is with some light editing and a couple of additional comments.

Response

I think the question [quoted above] misunderstands the issue for Christian Never Trumpers. Having no standing to speak on behalf of them as a group, I’ll speak for myself.

My primary concern is not about who wins this election, what happens to the Supreme Court, and so on. My concern is the witness of the Church. We are called to be ambassadors for the coming reign of God, to exhibit love and compassion, to speak up about injustice. We are resident-aliens in this world, not full citizens. Highlighting the intensity of that commitment, Jesus says in Luke 14:26 that the Kingdom even takes precedence over family ties. Ties that compromise that witness are idolatry.

There are no perfect candidates unless Jesus is on the ballot. Every candidate will have shortcomings. We are not looking for perfection. A candidate need not be Christian. The question is about general moral character, not the candidate’s specific religious doctrinal beliefs. The Church stays independent, whoever is elected, lifting up that which is good and offering critique for that which is not, but first and foremost living as a community that exhibits the marks of the Kingdom.

As each of us votes, we must make a determination about which of the candidates, if any, offers sufficient merit to receive our vote. Some conservative voters see Clinton as unacceptable. Fine. Let’s take her off the table. This being the case, some feel they must vote for Trump. Fine. I think that is misguided, but let’s grant that.

The issue is not that someone might vote for Trump. The issue is the attempt by the Christian Right to characterize Trump as basically a good guy, a baby Christian, basically "one of us," who is just a little rough around the edges. Trump is not a little rough around the edges.

Have you read Art of the Deal? Have you watched his life unfold? At the core of Trump’s life is the very antithesis of the Sermon on the Mount. He brags that never needs to apologize or repent about anything. [His recent apology about leaked videotapes was noteworthy for its novelty but also for NOT being an apology to the people he had wronged. It was to the voters who have the power to withhold something he wants.] He has been the apostle for win at all costs. You don’t just defeat opponents. You destroy and humiliate anyone who gets in your way. He advocated seducing the wives of rivals to humiliate them and bragged about having done so himself. He made his fortune exploiting human frailty in the area of gambling. You are unflinchingly loyal to him or you are an absolute loser. I can go on. Everything about him exudes an unstable vindictive predatory character. His “unfortunate” statements are not the product of an unpolished public figure. They are the product of a calculating, manipulative, pathological personality.

Democracy runs on the basis that there are competing views in society. When someone wins an election, the loser concedes and the winner leaves the loser standing, the loser living to fight another day. It is the understanding that no victory or loss is ever final, that keeps society moving along, even with disagreement. Trump routinely demonstrates he cannot tolerate the presence of opposition, period! Not even from beauty queens. From the beginning of the campaign to present, it has all been about what HE is going to do. By sheer force of his personality and will, and without any clear understanding of the basics of governance and a demonstrated unwillingness to learn them, he is going to fix everything. This is World Wrestling Entertainment bravado, not leadership. This grandiosity, coupled with a vindictive predatory temperament, is the recipe for authoritarianism.

Too many Christian Right Trumpers are not simply voting for the lesser of two evils. They are serving as his apologists, legitimizing his profound evils. It is an act of hypocrisy, considering all the criticism leveled at the moral failings of candidates in the past. When it is their agenda that is at stake, all concern about character goes out the window. You think Trump is the better candidate? Fine. But do not insult us with minimizing who this man is.

[As one Facebook friend posted: "You cannot support Ahab because you think he is somehow better than Jezebel and call it righteous."--Dennis Bills]

Let’s assume that by not voting for Trump, a Clinton presidency leads to some very unfriendly policies toward Christian Right people. So be it! The Church’s mission is not to win elections but to give witness to the coming Kingdom. That witness can be given through martyrdom if need be. Christ does not need the help of hateful authoritarian demagogues to achieve his purposes.

I am not that familiar with McMullin. From what I hear to date, he seems to be a principled man with admirable ethical standards, wanting to build a more civil society with aspiration and persuasion. To the degree that turns out to be true, he is a welcomed refreshing voice. I don’t care what his specific doctrines are.

Final Thoughts

In the end, I am sure I was not persuasive. For many on the Christian Right, this election is visceral. Social psychologists write about “motivated perception,” where what we see gets shaped by what we feel is at stake. For so many, legitimate or not, Hillary Clinton is the embodiment of the “other side” in the culture wars of the past forty years. The idea of letting her win, much less vote for her, is nihilistic and apocalyptic. One is forced to choose between letting loose the apocalypse or voting for a candidate who is the antithesis to all you have previously advocated as morally necessary.

The motivation to legitimize and rationalize Trump is powerful. According to survey research comparing 2011 to 2016, White Evangelical Protestants went from being the religious segment least likely to believe that someone who commits immoral acts in private life can govern ethically (2011 = 30%) to the most likely (2016 = 71%). (Source) Jeff Jacoby compares statements by leaders before 2011 with statements after in his piece How the religious right embraced Trump and lost its moral authority. When holding a moral standard means substantial loss, they embraced moral relativity, the cardinal sin of “secular-progressives” they so despise. Again, my point is not that someone will vote for Trump. My concern is that those who decide they will vote for Trump should not minimize and trivialize who the man shows himself to be.

In closing, I will say that our present circumstances in the American Church are not purely the problem of the Christian Right. Across the political spectrum, much of American Church is not formed by the gospel of Jesus Christ. A great many progressive Christians have concluded that the answer to the Christian Right is the emergence of the Christian Left. They participate in the same hyperbolic “othering” that the Right has done and call it “prophetic” and “social justice advocacy.” And what we learn now is that when you have for years embraced characterizations of your opponents as wanting to kill women, equating them to holocaust deniers, and declared them to be functionally no different than the Taliban, you lose the words to name genuine authoritarianism when it appears. (See Crying Wolf, Then Confronting Trump) The answer is not a more progressive church. The answer is a loving community of resident-aliens, seeking the welfare of the city, seeking truth no matter the implications for our host culture’s political agendas. Right, left, or whatever, precious little of the American Church owns that vision.

Why So Much Outrage? Thinking About My Discipleship

Bloomberg had an excellent piece by science journalist Faye Flam, titled It's an Outrage! See? Look How Outraged I Am! Her lead is "Science is starting to shed some light on the curiously continuous cycle of moral outrages." Expressions of collective outrage are not particularly new but it does seem to me the frequency of expressed outrage, and outrage over more and more trivial events, has increased. Why? Psychologists offer this thought:

Psychologists say it all starts to make sense if you think of outrage as a form of display. Expressing it advertises a person’s views and allegiances to potential allies. And the more popular a victim's cause, the less risky it is to join in displaying your umbrage.

So is the outrage disingenuous?

 

Psychologist Jillian Jordan, who led the Yale experiment, said she wasn't trying to suggest that people were faking outrage for the purpose of looking good. She believes people genuinely feel the outrage. The point was to explain the urge to share it so ostentatiously.

 

In real-world cases, most people unconsciously tally costs and benefits, said Harvard psychologist Max Krasnow. There is a cost to outrage, in terms of social risk. The cost shrinks when there are more and more people expressing it in solidarity. If you’re the only person lobbing yogurt at the Icelandic Parliament, you might well get arrested. But if you’re part of a teeming mob, your collective display of outrage can lead to the ousting of the prime minister.

 

So what triggers outrage?

Why do some incidents provoke almost universal outrage and others set off only those in certain age groups or of particular political leanings? One of the most universal sources of outrage is stealing or hoarding resources, said psychologist Eric Pederson. The theory is that this is ingrained in humans because our ancestors' foraging cultures survived by sharing; if Joe helped himself to what others hunted and gathered, but then did not share his good fortune when he found berries or killed a wildebeest, he’d get in deep trouble.

Humanity’s deeply rooted antipathy for cheaters helps explain the outrage over the tax evaders revealed by the Panama Papers. But in other cases, said psychologist Robert Boyd, the definition of what's outrageous is dictated by less objectively obvious cultural norms. Humans are wired to pick up cultural rules and norms, and to aim outrage at violators, he said. Cultural norms vary by political leanings, geography and other factors. Often there’s a large generation gap.

Harvard’s Krasnow said it all comes back to the fact that displays are aimed at potential allies. An outraged person may have no personal tie to a given issue, but outrage can signal sympathy with those who do. This can be quite noble and selfless, not entirely self-serving; the two blur together in ways that allow human civilization to work to the extent that it does.

According to an anthropologist I read, human reason evolved in the context of communal survival. People observed patterns in events around them and developed heuristic models for survival. They fashioned stories to make sense of events and their place in them. Reason developed as a way to reinforce stories and strengthen societal cohesion. Which is also to say, reason that challenged societal stories and cohesion was a threat. We are not naturally wired for objectivity.

 

It seems to me that expression of outrage serves a similar function. Narrowly, outrage is about calling out destructive behavior, but more broadly, it is about expressing social solidarity. Sometimes it is hard to tell which is the driving motivator.

 

I have long suspected that the rising waves of outrage may have more and more to do with a need for social solidarity than moral indignation. In a post-modern era, identity is much harder to define and solidify, making us feel more insecure. That insecurity leads us to seek out opportunities for solidarity. Expressing outrage is just such an opportunity, particularly if the offending party/parties are of a "tribe" whom we jointly find disagreeable. The person(s) at the center of the outrage may become completely objectified, serving as a prop in the solidarity building exercise. Exaggerations, misrepresentations, and apocryphal stories will often be added to heighten the outrage and amplify the endorphin-releasing satisfaction that comes from intensely felt "outrage" solidarity.

 

The problem, of course, is that in our rush to solidarity we can dehumanize others and make poor decisions. Applying a little objectivity will often show a more complex set of circumstances than our outrage will allow. Over the years, I can't possibly recall the number of times I have calmly pointed out some exaggeration or misinformation in a charged conversation. It doesn't matter that I may even be entirely sympathetic with those who are outraged. The reaction is predictable. I am a traitor. I am at least being dismissive of people's suffering. When I point out their is no change in the number police officers killed on duty in the face of claims of increasing murderous violence against police officers because of Black Lives Matter, I am insensitive to police officers. When I point that global extreme-poverty has halved over the past thirty years and global inequality is declining in the face of claims that "neoliberal capitalism" is making the poor poorer and driving up inequality, I am insensitive to people suffering in poverty. Objective input is not welcome because ultimately the conversation is about subjective commitments, not objective discernment.

 

Flam closes the article with:

 

“It’s a complicated game we’re playing," Krasnow said, "and sometimes the best strategy is to say nothing.”

 

I agree but the operative word is "sometimes." How about the other times? How are we to conduct ourselves then? I do not write this as someone who has achieved objectivity and never participates in outrage. Not every expression of outrage is inappropriate. Hardly! And yet, I am self-aware enough to see the dehumanizing, exaggerating, hyperbolic, demon lurking at the edge of consciousness when I am outraged. I am aware of how good it feels to be in solidarity with a tribe who feels my intense outrage. As a Christian, I know discipleship has political consequences but does following Jesus really look like a endless rolling wave of outrage? What does it mean when we are so quick to misrepresent facts and dehumanize our opponents when the one we say we follow said:

 

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors [and the Republicans, and the Democrats, and the ...] doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." (Matt 5:43-48)

 

It is almost as if Jesus is saying that love should be our solidifying value, not outrage. I do not know. I still working on it. Let me know if you figure it out.

6 New Rules of Business for the Next Industrial Revolution

Alan Murray at Fortune summarizes a more lengthy piece by Geoff Colvin called Why every aspect of your business is about to change. Here is my summary of Murray's summary:

1. You don't need a lot of physical capital. ...

2. Human capital will matter more than ever. ...

3. The nature of employment will change. For the rest of your employees, gig work will grow. ...

4. Winners will win bigger, and the rest will fight harder for the remains. ... McKinsey Global Institute puts it: "tech and tech-enabled firms destroy more value for incumbents than they create for themselves."

5. Corporations will have shorter lives. The average life span of companies in the S&P 500 has already fallen from 61 years in 1958 to 20 years today. It will fall further.

6. Intellectual property knows no natural boundaries. 

Fascinating stuff.

Infographic: 20 cognitive biases that screw up your decisions

Business Insider: 20 cognitive biases that screw up your decisions

A great infographic from Business Insider.

Why We Reject Facts & Embrace Conflict

Real Clear Science: Why We Reject Facts & Embrace Conflict

There is a growing body of research suggesting that when beliefs become tied to one’s sense of identity, they are not easily revised. Instead, when these axioms are threatened, people look for ways to outright dismiss inconvenient data. If this cannot be achieved by highlighting logical, methodological or factual errors, the typical response is to leave the empirical sphere altogether and elevate the discussion into the moral and ideological domain, whose tenets are much more difficult to outright falsify (generally evoking whatever moral framework best suits one’s rhetorical needs).

While often described in pejorative terms, these phenomena may be more akin to “features,” than “bugs,” of our psychology. ...

For instance, the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis holds that the primary function of rationality is social, rather than epistemic. Specifically, our rational faculties were designed to mitigate social conflicts (or conflicting interests). But on this account, rationality is not a neutral mediator. Instead, it is deployed in the service of one’s own interests and desires—which are themselves heavily informed by our sense of identity. ...

... Accordingly, the best way to reduce polarization is not by obscuring critical differences under the pretense of universalism. Instead, societies should aspire to lower the perceived stakes of these identity conflicts.  

For example, rigidity, polarization and groupthink are much less common, and more easily addressed, in deliberations within an identity group; closed-mindedness is largely a response to a perceived threat from outside. In heterogeneous contexts, many of the benefits of this enclave deliberation can be achieved by engaging interlocutors in terms of their own framing and narratives, mindful of their expressed concerns and grievances. That is, identity differences should not be suppressed, avoided or merely tolerated, but instead emphasized, encouraged and substantively respected—emphasizing pluralism over sectarianism. This can create a foundation where good-faith exchange and intergroup cooperation are feasible. Or put another way, the problem isn’t cultural cognition, it’s the lack of cross-cultural competence.

Excellent article!

Stop Trying to Save the World (Good Intentions Are Not Enough!)

New Republic: Stop Trying to Save the World: Big ideas are destroying international development, Michael Hobbes

One of the first classes I took in the economic development program at Eastern University was a class where we spent the entire semester studying the wide variety of economic development models that had been tried. Few worked. The best attempts led to very modest improvements. The worst had perverse unintended consequences. The overall message? Economic development is hard to do well!

I missed this article by Michael Hobbes from New Republic last November. It is a 6,000+word essay but it is one of the best reads I have seen on the need for careful ongoing assessment and it is a warning of the inefficient - even perverse - consequences when we do not empirically test our assumptions. Here are some key excerpts.

Maybe the problem isn’t that international development doesn’t work. It’s that it can’t.

He points to these examples:

In the late ’90s, Michael Kremer, then an economics professor at MIT, was in Kenya working on an NGO project that distributed textbooks to schools in poor rural districts. Around that time, the ratio of children to textbooks in Kenya was 17 to 1. The intervention seemed obvious: Poor villages need textbooks, rich donors have the money to buy them. All we have to do is link them up.

But in the early stages of the project, Kremer convinced the researchers to do it differently. He wanted to know whether giving kids textbooks actually made them better students. So instead of handing out books and making a simple before-and-after comparison, he designed the project like a pharmaceutical trial. He split the schools into groups, gave some of them the “treatment” (i.e., textbooks) and the others nothing. Then he tested everyone, not just the kids who got the books but also the kids who didn’t, to see if his intervention had any effect.

It didn’t. The trial took four years, but it was conclusive: Some of the kids improved academically over that time and some got worse, but the treatment group wasn’t any better off than the control.

Then Kremer tried something else. Maybe the kids weren’t struggling in school because of what was going on in the classroom, but because of what was going on outside of it. So again, Kremer split the schools into groups and spent three years testing and measuring them. This time, the treatment was an actual treatment—medication to eradicate stomach worms. Worm infections affect up to 600 million children around the world, sapping their nutrition and causing, among other things, anemia, stomachaches, and stunting.

Once more, the results were conclusive: The deworming pills made the kids noticeably better off. Absence rates fell by 25 percent, the kids got taller, even their friends and families got healthier. By interrupting the chain of infection, the treatments had reduced worm infections in entire villages. Even more striking, when they tested the same kids nearly a decade later, they had more education and earned higher salaries. The female participants were less likely to be employed in domestic services.

And compared with Kremer’s first trial, deworming was a bargain. Textbooks cost $2 to $3 each. Deworming pills were as little as 49 cents. When Kremer calculated the kids’ bump in lifetime wages compared with the cost of treatment, it was a 60-to-1 ratio.

This is perfect TED Talk stuff: Conventional wisdom called into question, rigorous science triumphing over dogma. As word of Kremer’s study spread, he became part of a growing movement within international development to subject its assumptions to randomized controlled trials.

Based on his analysis, Kremer went on to ramp up a deworming NGO but Hobbes notes the NGO stopped testing after their initial research. Additional testing by others revealed more nuance.

It’s an interesting question—when do you have enough evidence to stop testing each new application of a development idea?—and I get that you can’t run a four-year trial every time you roll out, say, the measles vaccine to a new country. But like many other aid projects under pressure to scale up too fast and too far, deworming kids to improve their education outcomes isn’t the slam-dunk its supporters make it out to be.

In 2000, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a literature review of 30 randomized control trials of deworming projects in 17 countries. While some of them showed modest gains in weight and height, none of them showed any effect on school attendance or cognitive performance. After criticism of the review by the World Bank and others, the BMJ ran it again in 2009 with stricter inclusion criteria. But the results didn’t change. Another review, in 2012, found the same thing: “We do not know if these programmes have an effect on weight, height, school attendance, or school performance.”

Kremer and Evidence Action dispute the way these reviews were carried out, and sent me an upcoming study from Uganda that found links between deworming and improved test scores. But the evidence they cite on their own website undermines this data. Kremer’s 2004 study reporting the results of the original deworming trial notes—in the abstract!—that “we do not find evidence that deworming improves academic test scores,” only attendance. Another literature review cited on Deworm the World’s website says, “When infected children are given deworming treatment, immediate educational and cognitive benefits are not always apparent.”

Then there’s the comparison to textbooks. Kenya, it turns out, is a uniquely terrible place to hand out textbooks to kids and expect better academic performance. When Kremer reported that textbooks had no overall effect, he also noted that they did actually improve test scores for the kids who were already at the top of the class. The main problem, it seems, was that the textbooks were in English, the second or third language for most of the kids. Of the third-graders given textbooks, only 15 percent could even read them.

In the 1980s and early ’90s, a series of meta-analyses found that textbooks were actually effective at improving school performance in places where the language issues weren’t as complex. In his own paper reporting the Kenya results, Kremer noted that, in Nicaragua and the Philippines, giving kids textbooks did improve their test scores.

Here is the crux of it:

But the point of all this is not to talk shit on Kremer—who has bettered the world more with his career than I ever have with mine—or to dismantle his deworming charity, or to advocate that we should all go back to giving out free textbooks. What I want to talk shit on is the paradigm of the Big Idea—that once we identify the correct one, we can simply unfurl it on the entire developing world like a picnic blanket.

There are villages where deworming will be the most meaningful education project possible. There are others where free textbooks will. In other places, it will be new school buildings, more teachers, lower fees, better transport, tutors, uniforms. There’s probably a village out there where a PlayPump would beat all these approaches combined. The point is, we don’t know what works, where, or why. The only way to find out is to test these models—not just before their initial success but afterward, and constantly.

I can see why it’s appealing to think that, once you find a successful formula for development, you can just scale it up like a Model T. Host governments want programs that get more effective as they get bigger. Individual donors, you and me, we want to feel like we’re backing a plucky little start-up that is going to save the world. No international institution wants to say in their annual report: “There’s this great NGO that increased attendance in a Kenyan school district. We’re giving them a modest sum to do the same thing in one other district in one other country.”

The repeated “success, scale, fail” experience of the last 20 years of development practice suggests something super boring: Development projects thrive or tank according to the specific dynamics of the place in which they’re applied. It’s not that you test something in one place, then scale it up to 50. It’s that you test it in one place, then test it in another, then another. No one will ever be invited to explain that in a TED talk.

Hobbes goes on to explain that testing means more money spent on overhead. That overhead would lead greater effectiveness and, in the long run, lead to a bigger bang for the overall buck, but everything we do now is oriented toward keeping overhead as lean as possible. We ramp up projects that end up being incredibly wasteful. Sometimes they can be downright destructive.

This is the paradox: When you improve something, you change it in ways you couldn’t have expected. You can find examples of this in every corner of development practice. A project in Kenya that gave kids free uniforms, textbooks, and classroom materials increased enrollment by 50 percent, swamping the teachers and reducing the quality of education for everyone. Communities in India cut off their own water supply so they could be classified as “slums” and be eligible for slum-upgrading funding. I’ve worked in places where as soon as a company sets up a health clinic or an education program, the local government disappears—why should they spend money on primary schools when a rich company is ready to take on the responsibility?

There’s nothing avaricious about this. If anything, it demonstrates the entrepreneurial spirit we’re constantly telling the poor they need to demonstrate.

My favorite example of unintended consequences comes, weirdly enough, from the United States. In a speech to a criminology conference, Nancy G. Guerra, the director of the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Delaware, described a project where she held workshops with inner-city Latina teenagers, trying to prevent them from joining gangs. The program worked in that none of the girls committed any violence within six months of the workshops. But by the end of that time, they were all, each and every one, pregnant.

“That behavior was serving a need for them,” she says in her speech. “It made them feel powerful, it made them feel important, it gave them a sense of identity. ... When that ended, [they] needed another kind of meaning in their lives.”

The fancy academic term for this is “complex adaptive systems.” ...

So do we give up?

First, let’s de-room this elephant: Development has happened. The last 50 years have seen about the biggest explosion of prosperity in human history. ...

Development, no matter how it happens, is a slow process. ...

The ability of international development projects to speed up this process is limited. ...

And this is where I landed after a year of absorbing dozens of books and articles and speeches about international development: The arguments against it are myriad, and mostly logistical and technical. The argument for it is singular, moral, and, to me anyway, utterly convincing: We have so much, they have so little. ...

To this I would add one note about faith-based economic development. There is a tendency to turn a tactic into a sacrament. Christians and congregations are frequently using two metrics for mission. First, there is a desire to help those in need. Second, there is a desire for congregants to be engaged in helping others in ways that are meaningful to the congregant. If the latter becomes particularly strong, then it is very difficult to alter tactics, no matter how much data you show that demonstrates ineffectiveness, and even harm. In my book, the first consideration is an absolute must. To do development that does not achieve the first criteria, no matter how meaningful it is to the congregation, is to dehumanize those in need as instruments for stroking our spiritual self-esteem. And that is why addressing economic issues from a Christian perspective requires both warm hearts AND cool heads.

"Anti-Science" and Social Identity

Tom Jacobs has an excellent piece at Pacific Standard, Threaten My Group, and I’ll Belittle Your Science. He writes:

Newly published research provides at least a partial answer. It finds scientific findings that challenge the assumptions of a group you strongly identify with motivate people to derogate the research in online comments.

When informal membership in a group—say, the anti-vaccine movement, or those opposed to genetically modified foods—informs your sense of self, and/or provides a feeling of pride and belonging, a perceived attack on its basic beliefs is grounds for a counterattack. Today, that often means writing nasty, dismissive comments online. ...

... While conceding that there are a number of reasons why gamers would choose to angrily argue with the science rather than seriously consider its implications, the researchers focus on one particularly interesting psychological framework: Social identity theory.

This school of thought contends that group membership (be it political, religious, or something as innocuous as being a fan of a particular sports team) is a significant source of our self-esteem. It follows logically that members have an interest in boosting the group’s status (and degrading the status of competing groups), since its prominence, or lack thereof, rubs off on ourselves. ...

... Perhaps this discovery can provide an opening for educators and policymakers as they attempt to get around this frustrating psychological block. If scientific findings are to be accepted and acted upon, they have to somehow be presented in a way that does not trigger a defensive reaction. 

We remain, in many ways, a tribal species, and if you challenge my “tribe,” don’t be surprised if the response is a metaphorical poke in the eye.

To this I would add that the reason a great majority of people hold a scientifically sanctioned position is not because of science, but also because of social identity. Science affirms my narrative and my tribe. "Science" becomes a weapon to deploy against other tribes. It lets me beat my chest in defiant superiority. It becomes a club with which to bludgeon those who threaten my tribe. Advocacy of the "scientific" position frequently has precious little to do with a concern for science. I don't care if it is climate change, vaccinations, evolution, GMOs, nuclear safety, or a host of other topics. It is far more about affirmation than information.

I'll also add this - if you think you are not affected by this dynamic, then you are likely either Commander Data from Star Trek or delusional. ;-) It is inescapable. We are communal creatures and tribalism is always a factor. The realistic response is to continually strive to be self-aware of our own tribal issues and be more accepting of the tribal buttons we push in others. Only then can we move toward genuine dialog.

Why Rich People Don't Care About You

Real Clear Science - Newton Blog: Why Rich People Don't Care About You

Examine the income ladder of the United States, and you'll soon stumble upon a surprising fact: Rich people donate a smaller portion of their income to charity than poor people. In 2011, people in the bottom 20% donated 3.2 percent of their earnings. People in the top 20% donated just 1.3 percent.

These numbers don't seem to be anomalous, but there is some nuance. Data from the National Center for Charitable Statistics shows that taxpayers making less than $60,000 donate around 3.75% per year, while those making between $200,000 and $10 million donate less than 3%. However, those making more than $10 million are the most generous of all, donating nearly 6% of their income.*

Psychologists have examined this dynamic even further.

"What we've been finding across dozens of studies and thousands of participants across this country is that as a person's levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness, and their ideology of self-interest increases," Paul Piff, an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Social Behavior at the University of California, Irvine, announced in a 2013 TEDx talk. ...

... Of course, the wealthy aren't doomed to be Scrooges. For instance, the studies did not examine if there were behavioral differences between those who earned their wealth versus those who simply lucked into it. Also, Keltner insists that the human brain is hardwired to care. The wealthy just have to consciously work to be more cognizant of their fellow humans.

I've read other studies that indicate that the wealthy are just as responsive to needs as less wealthy people but wealthy people are more isolated from the needs of people farther down the economic ladder. Social distance and ignorance may be factors as big or bigger than selfishness or indifference.

The Law of Asymmetric Insight Versus the Law of Assymetric Insight

Arnold Kling recently posted Pete Boettke on Ideology and Economics. The economics in the article is interesting but I particularly liked this sentence:

"Keep in mind, however, the Law of Asymmetric Insight: when two people disagree, each one tends to think that he understands his opponent better than the opponent understands himself."

I suspect a measure of this is unavoidable. If I do not think my view has greater merit, and therefore other views are flawed, why would I hold my view? The trick in addressing a disagreement is dealing respectfully with others, valuing them, and maybe asking more questions while issuing fewer pontifications. I'm trying to be better a this. Sometimes I learn the Asymmetry of insight is not always in my favor.

The challenge is to avoid the Law of Assymetric Insight, which is the Law of Asymmetric Insight with an addendum:  when two people disagree, each one tends to think that he understands his opponent better than the opponent understands himself, and he is therefore justified in behaving like an ass.

In short, have convictions but don't be an ass.

ReFrame: Following Christ in the Modern Era

What does it mean to follow Christ in our era? That is the central question for Christians in any era but it is particularly challenging today. Some suggest that our postmodern and post-Christendom context is creating a level of disruption in the church not seen since the Reformation. I think that is likely true. So how do we follow Christ today?

A new curriculum called ReFrame attempts a response. It is “A powerful 10-week film-based exploration of what it means to follow Christ in the modern era,” produced by Regent College (Vancouver, British Columbia) in cooperation with The Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation & Culture. It is truly exceptional series.

The curriculum features ten videos, each about thrity-nine minutes long. The first episode speaks to the increasing complexity and fragmentation of modern life. Our tendency is either to assimilate with our cultural context or to withdraw. We do not have a clear vision of how God might be at work in our midst.  We do not know how to follow. The series uses the Emmaus Road story as a metaphor for being unable to see Christ among us until our vision is “reframed.” The second episode delves a little deeper in the specific challenges we face.

Beginning in the third episode, the series takes a narrative approach, moving from creation and fall, to Israel, to Jesus the King, to new creation, to the Church and the Spirit, and so on, helping us see how our daily work and life is connected with God’s “story” at work in the world. The series concludes with guidance on how we might more authentically be disciples in light of our context and in light of God’s unfolding narrative.

The format of each episode is built around the TED Talk concept. Half of the video is a speaker making an engaging presentation. There is a setup segment at the beginning and a wrap-up segment at the end. Interspersed throughout the video is commentary and testimony given by biblical scholars and theologians, as well as vignettes by people from business, law, education, and science. People like Scot McKnight, Andy Crouch, Amy Sherman, and Eugene Peterson, are among several of the contributors. Each episode is very well produced, moving along at an engaging pace.

I cannot emphasize enough how refreshing this curriculum is. I have been serving in various leadership capacities within the Presbyterian Church, USA, and in a variety of faith-based entities most of my adult life. At some point in the late 1990s, I discerned that many Christians have a difficult time seeing how their discipleship connects with daily life in truly meaningful ways. Church has become ancillary to “real life.” The church is the place to receive therapeutic care, to get moral instruction for children, or to join programs that offer opportunities for charity and pursuit of justice outside of real life. The church is not a place where we are formed for mission at the workplace and in the mundane affairs of the world. It is my conviction that renewal in the church will begin only when God’s mission and the whole of life is reintegrated.

Key to reintegration is reframing, yet I find precious few people in ecclesiastical structures and academic institutions who see the urgency and centrality of this need. When attempts are made, they usually proceed from a purely theological bent, without dialog with other disciplines like sociology, economics, science, education, and business. They lack a winsome authenticity. ReFrame is a refreshing exception.

ReFrame acknowledges its Evangelical milieu but I am convinced the curriculum would be well received across a wide range of denominational and theological communities. I am working out the details of doing multiple small groups with the series at Pine Ridge Presbyterian, starting at Lent. The idea is to buy a digital license and “flip the classroom.” Participants will watch each episode online at a password protected site and then meet weekly to discuss and apply what was learned. The curriculum is a turnkey product complete with guides and promotional materials.

I have been following Regent College for at least fifteen years and continue to be impressed with their innovation and quality services. I know of few other institutions like Regent. The College offers classes and degrees that focus on the reintegration of life and I am sure one purpose of the curriculum is to raise the profile of the academic and practical resources they provide. More power to them!  I hope they are so successful that seminaries around the country will feel compelled to follow their lead. Maybe even the Presbyterians one day. ;-)

You definitely need to check out ReFrame. If you go to their site, you will find a two-minute promotional video. Episodes 1 and 5 are available for free so you can get a flavor of the experience. Thanks to the ReFrame folks for an exceptional product. I cannot wait to put it to use.

Low-income communities are not needy -- they have assets

Faith and Leadership Blog: John McKnight: Low-income communities are not needy -- they have assets

Most people and institutions that want to serve poor communities are focused on what the residents lack. “What are the needs?” is often the first question asked.

John McKnight says that approach has it backward.

“I knew from being a neighborhood organizer that you could never change people or neighborhoods with the basic proposition that what we need to do is fix them,” he said. “What made for change was communities that believed they had capacities, skills, abilities and could create power when they came together in a community.”

McKnight is co-director of the Asset-Based Community Development Institute and professor emeritus of communications studies and education and social policy at Northwestern University.

He and his longtime colleague John Kretzmann created the asset-based community development (ABCD) strategy for community building. Together they wrote a basic guide to the approach called “Building Communities From the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets.”

McKnight also wrote “The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits” and, with co-author Peter Block, “The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods.” ...

McKnight spoke to Faith & Leadership about asset-based community development and the role the church can play in helping people identify and leverage their strengths to empower their communities. The following is an edited transcript. ...

Excellent piece on a asset-based community development. Read the whole thing. More churches need to learn to think this way.

I Stand With My Friends ... Black and Blue

There is an old joke about a mealy-mouthed politician who says, “Some of my friends are for this measure. Some of friends are against it. As me for me, I stand with my friends.” I’ve always loved that joke, but through the years I’ve learned that there are circumstances where standing with my friends is the right response.

Today I am told I must choose between supporting police officers and supporting minorities who tell of problems in dealing with law enforcement. Each camp points to the most extreme behavior of opponents to justify dismissive and dehumanizing responses. Yet one of the most challenging articles I’ve read came shortly after the Ferguson verdict. (Why I Feel Torn About the Ferguston Verdict) Safiya Jafari Simmons, a black woman who is the wife of a police officer and the mother of a black son, writes of her dilemma in telling her husband to do what he has to do to come home safe each night while also worrying about what may happen to her son through profiling or a misunderstanding by police. The choice between supporting law enforcement and supporting minorities with frustrations is a false choice.

As we mourn the loss of the two murdered NYPD officers, let us pray for God’s shalom to be made full, especially as we celebrate the birth of the Prince of Shalom. And let us pray that God would reveal to each of us our role in the realization of that shalom.

#bluelivesmatter #blacklivesmatter

Race and Justifiable Homicide by Law Enforcement

Stanford psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt recently recounted this conversation between her and her son:

I’m on an airplane with my son. And he looks up and he sees a black man, and he says, “Hey, that guy looks like daddy.”

And I look at the guy, he doesn’t look anything like my husband, and I notice he’s the only black guy on the plane. And he says, “I hope he doesn’t rob the plane.”

And I said, “Well, why would you say that?”

And he looked at me and he said, “I don’t know why I said that.”

And so we’re living with such severe racial stratification that even a 5-year-old can tell us what’s supposed to happen next.

As early as five years old, children (even black children!) learn that black men are suspect. One recent study showed that more than 40% of people think many or most black men are violent. It was 15% for white men and black women, and even lower for white women.

Another interesting study flashed a picture to a group of people. Two white men were fighting. One was holding a knife. When asked who had held the knife, most of the subjects gave the correct answer. A second picture featured a white man and a black man. The white man was holding the knife. When asked about this second picture, most people - black and white - incorrectly identified the black man as holding the knife. Deeply engrained biases actually alter what we see. What might this mean for law enforcement?

I have documented that the rate of justifiable homicide by law enforcement has been increasing since 2000, even as the rate of crime has been falling. I take this as a proxy indicator for more violence in general being used by law enforcement. I have also noted two possible contributing factors. First, “Broken windows” policing came into vogue in the wake of the of a crack cocaine epidemic twenty-five years ago. Minor violations were enforced in an effort to restore order in beleaguered neighborhoods. People wanted more aggressive policing. Second, 9/11 has moved our collective psyche toward viewing ourselves as continuously living with imminent threats. Policing tactics become more aggressive in an emergency and maybe this spills over into everyday policing. I would suggest a third factor upon more reflection. The collapse of the economy in 2008, has left many people with much less confidence in the government’s ability to work well and to protect them. Domestic events like Sandy Hook and international events like ISIS beheadings create a sense of world running amok.

These factors may explain why justifiable homicides have been increasing but why should this have a disproportionate impact on blacks killed by police relative the rate crime in their communities? Some activists see a calculated race war against African-Americans. Law enforcement is only one step removed from Bull Connor or the KKK. Studies suggest that upwards of about 25% of Americans have openly hostile attitudes about African-Americans. Law enforcement officers are drawn from society so there are no doubt represented among law enforcement. With 17,000+ law enforcement agencies in the U.S., I have no doubt particular law enforcement agencies can come under the sway of such attitudes. But the idea that law enforcement community is part of some orchestrated act of oppression goes much too far. All the evidence points to most police officers being highly dedicated people who genuinely want to serve all the public well. Does this then mean that apart from a few bad apples, that there is no racial component to what is happening?

As I listen to conversations about recent controversies, I hear a common refrain from many in the white community. If there was no explicit exclamation of racial animus by a police officer, then there was no racism. Any attempt to raise race as a piece of the problem is viewed as “reading things in,” or even worse, an attempt at race-baiting or playing the race card. This seeing racial bias purely in terms of conscious motivations of individual actors errors in another direction.

I think race is an issue in the rise of justifiable homicide rates in at least three important ways. First, look at the strategies and tactics we use. Neighborhoods most at risk from becoming bases of serious criminal activity are poorer neighborhoods. Minorities make up disproportionately high percentages of these neighborhoods. Any aggressive policing strategy, like broken windows, is going to have disproportionate impact on minorities. Confrontational interactions between law enforcement and citizens will rise, and more interactions mean more opportunities for lethal force. In some cases, our policing strategies set the stage for disproportionate negative impacts with police regardless of the motivations of any particular officers.

Second, we have deep-seated perceptions about black communities and black men. Officers have discretion as to use of lethal force when they feel threatened. Like the young black boy on the airplane, there will be a perception of a black man as a greater threat. The threshold for an officer to act or react will be lower. Without any willful malice toward black men, race will have had an impact in the death of some black men. Studies show that, with good training, officers can learn to ignore irrelevant issues like race but how widespread and effective is that training?

Third, there are bad or incompetent actors in law enforcement who do not belong there. Law enforcement is difficult disciplined work and, as with any human organization, there are going to be unqualified people who slip through even the best screening process. So let us not ignore that there are officers who do harbor ill will. Aggressive protocols give opportunity for expression of this will.

So even absent conscious malice by individual players, race is thoroughly “baked in” to the decisions we make about law enforcement. It is easy for me to be emotionally detached from this problem as a middle-aged white guy but when your whole life is peppered with what feels like constant harassment by law enforcement it is a different story. Marry to this frustration the living memory of once pervasive lynching and miscarriages of justice done with impunity toward the black community, and visceral reactions are not surprising. Justifiable homicide is just an extreme example of a more pervasive reality.

So I will conclude this series of three posts suggesting that what we have is not so much a law enforcement problem but a societal problem. There a bad apples and incompetent players in law enforcement, just as there are in any human institution, but law enforcement is made up mostly of dedicated people who want to serve well. The difference here is that when officers mess up people can get killed. Standards must be high. But law enforcement is also responsive to the public’s demands. And if our fearful demands lead to policies that have unintended negative consequences, should we be blaming law enforcement for those consequences? Better collection of data and reforming a process where the final determination on justifiable homicide is being made by law enforcement agencies and prosecuting attorneys who exist in a symbiotic relationship, are two reform measures that are being discussed. But even before that, I think we need to reflect on to what degree fear is driving us to make bad policy decisions.

But there is another societal problem. Racial perceptions pervade our society. As law enforcement draws it officers from our society, it ranks will be reflective of the views held by society as a whole. We certainly need to work to drive racial bias out of law enforcement behavior but foremost we need to work to drive bias out of society. That would in turn rectify law enforcement behavior. And to that end, I would suggest that white Americans need to stop looking to every excess by either rioting protestors or self-aggrandizing activists as a basis for being dismissive of black voices. I’m now moving out beyond the issue of justifiable homicide but we are kidding ourselves if we think we can solve problems like these with a narrow focus on reforming law enforcement.

The two previous posts:

Justifiable Homicide by Law Enforcement by the Numbers

Why the Increase in Justifiable Homicide by Law Enforcement?

Followership: The Other Side of Leadership

Ivey Business Journal: Followership: The Other Side of Leadership

"... Followership is a straightforward concept.  It is the ability to take direction well, to get in line behind a program, to be part of a team and to deliver on what is expected of you.  It gets a bit of a bad rap!  How well the followers follow is probably just as important to enterprise success as how well the leaders lead.

The label “excellent follower” can be a backhanded compliment.  It is not a reputation you necessarily want if you are seeking higher corporate office.  There is something of a stigma to followership skills.  Pity because the practical reality is one does not reach progressively more responsible leadership positions without demonstrating an ability to follow and function effectively in a group.  The fact is that in organizations everybody is both a leader and a follower depending on the circumstances which just adds to the paradox of the followership stigma.

Followership may take the backseat to leadership but it matters:  it matters a lot!  Quite simply, where followership is a failure, not much gets done and/or what does get done is not what was supposed to get done.  Followership problems manifest themselves in a poor work ethic, bad morale, distraction from goals, unsatisfied customers, lost opportunities, high costs, product quality issues and weak competitiveness.  At the extreme, weak leadership and weak followership are two sides of the same coin and the consequence is always the same:  organizational confusion and poor performance. ..."

5 Things I’ve Learned in 5 Weeks Out of Church - Tom LeGrand

Perspectives: 5 Things I’ve Learned in 5 Weeks Out of Church - Tom LeGrand

Consider this official. I am issuing an apology to every member of every church that I have served over the last 20+ years. ...

... But this Sunday Sabbatical has also illustrated some things to me, particularly now that I am working a 9-to-5 (or, more like 7-to-6) day. Honestly, I’ve never had a real job before, one that occupied a truly specific time slot and required a very specific and demanding schedule. Yes, church work is intense, but the one perk is that it usually has a great deal of flexibility in the day-to-day operations.

I actually think that every pastor needs a season of the workaday world, as it would benefit both the leader and the led. It is amazing how much can be learned by living in the same mode as the people to whom you are called to minister. Here are a few that I’ve picked up: ...

Getting up for church is hard

Family Matters

Yes, It’s okay to attend church where your children want to go

A Sunday off is not a damnable offense

Meaningful relationships are much better motivators than guilt

Good reflection.

 

Prudent but not puritan (Religion and Spending)

Economist: Prudent but not puritan

...  After using a lot of fancy statistical tools, they came up with some expected findings, and some rather unexpected ones. Households "with a strong commitment to faith"— demonstrated by higher spending on religious activities—are less likely to be weighed down by excessive mortgage outgoings or loan payments for cars. Compared with other households, they are more likely to be home owners but their property tax burden tends to be less—suggesting that "some moderation in [the] selection of home in terms of extravagance or location...."

Devout households seem keener on mitigating risk and therefore spend more on life insurance and health insurance; they lay out less on alcohol and tobacco and more on domestic appliances, including cooking utensils. Such homely behaviour is most heavily correlated with religious belief in the American South and Midwest, which are also the regions with "the most conservative interpretation of scripture," Mr Showers notes, in an article in the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion. (The research more-or-less conflates the term "religious" with "Christian" or "Judeo-Christian" which in the American context is only a smallish distortion.)

But religious families do allow themselves some earthly pleasures. Indeed, they are if anything a little more likely than other households to spend spare money on clothing or jewellery, although the amount each household splurges on jewellery is a bit less. Some of that jewellery, of course, might be devotional: silver crosses or stars of David. They are as likely as anybody else to be spending money on child support or alimony—a proxy for failed marriages—and they are as inclined as other folk to incur interest payments on credit cards. ...

"What do you have in your hands?"

I love this short video!

"In Scripture, when God’s people approach Him with their dreams and desires, He sometimes answers with an unexpected question: 'What do you have in your hands?'"

Hope International

How can we reduce polarization and confirmation bias?

We live in an increasingly polarized society. How do we reverse this trend? My reflection on this topic keeps taking me back to the basic question raised in the sociology of knowledge: How do we know what we think we know? During college in the late 1970s, I read Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman’s classic The Social Construction of Reality. Their description of how we construct and reinforce reality with social interaction is one of the most important books I have ever read. It gave me a lifelong interest in the field.

If studying this field has taught me anything, coherence of ideas is not enough. I value coherence but we must be test ideas in the real world. And yet, the way I go about testing ideas will be influenced by the socially constructed reality in which I live. There is no complete escape from our psychosocial context, but we can stretch our understanding.

For these reasons, I relish the opportunity to discuss topics with people of differing perspectives. Unfortunately, many of the topics that most interest me are bristling with political implications. Civil conversation is difficult. Observations that challenge conventional understanding typically provoke derisive banter instead of substantive dialog. Dispassionate presentation of factual information with measured commentary does the same thing. No matter what I try, it is hard to keep dialog dispassionately focused on the substance. Why?

I think economist Timothy Taylor has some great insight. In his post Political Polarization and Confirmation Bias he writes:

Part of the reason American voters have become more polarized in recent decades is that both sides feel better-informed.

The share of Democrats who had “unfavorable” attitudes about the Republican Party rose from 57 percent in 1994 to 79 percent in 2014, according to a Pew Research Center survey in June called “Political Polarization in the American Public.”

Similarly, the percentage of Republicans who had unfavorable feelings about the Democratic Party climbed from 68 percent to 82 percent.

When you “feel” better informed, you tend to be more confident about your views and more dismissive of your opponent’s views. But are we truly better informed?

A common response to this increasing polarization is to call for providing more unbiased facts. But in a phenomenon that psychologists and economists call “confirmation bias,” people tend to interpret additional information as additional support for their pre-existing ideas.

One classic study of confirmation bias was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1979 by three Stanford psychologists, Charles G. Lord, Lee Ross and Mark R. Lepper. In that experiment, 151 college undergraduates were surveyed about their beliefs on capital punishment. Everyone was then exposed to two studies, one favoring and one opposing the death penalty. They were also provided details of how these studies were done, along with critiques and rebuttals for each study.

The result of receiving balanced pro-and-con information was not greater intellectual humility — that is, a deeper perception that your own preferred position might have some weaknesses and the other side might have some strengths. Instead, the result was a greater polarization of beliefs. Student subjects on both sides — who had received the same packet of balanced information! — all tended to believe that the information confirmed their previous position.

A number of studies have documented the reality of confirmation bias since then. In an especially clever 2013 study, Dan M. Kahan (Yale University), Ellen Peters (Ohio State), Erica Cantrell Dawson (Cornell) and Paul Slovic (Oregon) showed that people’s ability to interpret numbers declines when a political context is added.

In this second study, the exact same numbers were used to make the case for the efficacy of a skin cream and for the efficacy of gun control. In the former case, the respondents accurately interpreted the numbers but in the latter case they could not, claiming the numbers supported pre-existing understanding when clearly they did not.

Now stop!!! What are you thinking about this very second? If you are like most of me, you are likely thinking about personal experiences where you witnessed this in others. If you are a liberal, you are likely thinking of those Fox News watching Neanderthals denying climate change. Or if you are conservative, those bleeding-heart mush-heads who think the government can provide quality healthcare. If so, then you are missing the point! The issue is how you and I engage in confirmation bias? We all do it. Yet by definition, it is hard to detect because it happens at a subconscious level.

Taylor writes:

… But what about you? One obvious test is how much your beliefs change depending on the party of a president.

For example, have your opinions on the economic dangers of large budget deficits varied, coincidentally, with whether the deficits in question occurred under President Bush (or Reagan) or under President Obama?

Is your level of outrage about presidents who push the edge of their constitutional powers aimed mostly at presidents of “the other” party? What about your level of discontent over government surveillance of phones and e-mails? Do your feelings about military actions in the Middle East vary by the party of the commander in chief?

He lists other examples. Then this:

Of course, for all of these issues and many others, there are important distinctions that can be drawn between similar policies at different times and places. But if your personal political compass somehow always rotates to point to how your pre-existing beliefs are already correct, then you might want to remember how confirmation bias tends to shade everyone’s thinking.

When it comes to political beliefs, most people live in a cocoon of semi-manufactured outrage and self-congratulatory confirmation bias. The Pew surveys offer evidence on the political segregation in neighborhoods, places of worship, sources of news — and even in who we marry.

I would add two more observations. First, we do not hold our political views in a vacuum. We tend to associate with people similar to us and to build community on shared values. Our views become part of an integrated web of factors that give us identity, a sense of community, and give coherence to the world around us. The more deeply embedded we are in a community the more deeply reinforced is the validity of our positions. Because of this, changing our position on an issue is rarely just an intellectual exercise.

A change in a position can pose a significant existential threat with substantial consequences to our relationships and sense of well-being. Keep in mind that Americans today say they are less likely to marry someone of a differing political party than they are of a different religion. What would it mean to change your political views in such a marriage? Furthermore, it is one thing to learn that I have been using the wrong skin cream. It is another to find out that as a the compassionate, justice-embracing, person I believe myself to be, that the fair-trade coffee I have been enthusiastically promoting is little more than a marketing ploy or that an abstinence program I have championed has no impact on teen pregnancy. What does that do to my personal identity? Change of views has deeply personal and emotional consequences.

Second, I came across this article as I was preparing this post, Nonpolitical Images Evoke Neural Predictors of Political Ideology. The authors write:

Accumulating evidence suggests that cognition and emotion are deeply intertwined, and a view of segregating cognition and emotion is becoming obsolete. People tend to think that their political views are purely cognitive (i.e., rational). However, our results further support the notion that emotional processes are tightly coupled to complex and high-dimensional human belief systems, and such emotional processes might play a much larger role than we currently believe, possibly outside our awareness of its influence.

This is critical. When I initiate discussions about economics or demography, I very often get an emotional response. Why? Why do I respond like this? Sometimes it is because I do not have the time or the expertise to grasp what was said. I turn to heuristics as a shortcut, making intuitive assessments about what someone said based on experience in other contexts.

At an almost unconscious level, I reason from experience that someone who talks about topic X and uses certain phrases or reasoning patterns, also holds a collection of other viewpoints. I then surmise what a person is really getting at. I put that assessment through an emotional filter based on how I feel about this type of person. If my feelings are positive, then I congratulate her on a well-reasoned argument. If my feelings are negative, then I congratulate myself for being sensible and I go to work postulating how she became so silly or malicious. In either case, actual reasoning about the subject matter is minimal. The truth is that emotion figures into all our assessments and it is probably best to be a little more humble about our own reasoning abilities and less hard on emotional responses from others.

Taylor closes his piece with this:

Being opposed to political polarization doesn’t mean backing off from your beliefs. But it does mean holding those beliefs with a dose of humility. If you can’t acknowledge that there is a sensible challenge to a large number (or most?) of your political views, even though you ultimately do not agree with that challenge, you are ill-informed.

So Taylor has offered some thoughts about polarization and confirmation bias. I have added a couple of additional wrinkles. I appreciate Taylor’s call to focus first on the log in my own eye. I need to be more self-aware of my own proclivities and I could often have more humility. What else? How can we reduce polarization and confirmation bias? What do you think?

Gossip is Good?

The Atlantic just ran an article called Have You Heard? Gossip Is Actually Good and Useful. The teaser was, "Talking behind other people's backs may not always be nice, but sometimes it can help promote cooperation and self-improvement." It is a very interesting read. You could discuss it from a number of different angles. This paragraph really caught my attention:

As the study explains, “by hearing about the misadventures of others, we may not have to endure costs to ourselves,” by making the same mistake. And because negative stories tend to stick better in the mind than positive stories, it makes sense that gossip about people who violated norms would be more instructive than gossip about people who are really great at norms. (What’s more, one study found that sharing a negative opinion of a person with someone is better for bonding with them than sharing a positive opinion.)

It strikes me that a considerable portion of political discourse plays a similar role. A small group of people are having a conversation when someone offhandedly makes a disparaging remark about a politician, a political party, or a public policy. Joe says, "Did you see the news today that this is the 17th straight year where global temps have not increased? So much for global warming." (Or "Did you see the news about the ice caps becoming 10% smaller over the last year? How does anyone deny global warming?") Though it may appear on the surface that the remark is inviting discussion, most often it is not. It is being deployed as means of reinforcing social cohesion. And woe to you if you are not discerning enough to know the difference.

The "appropriate" response is to affirm what has been said with your own comments. As members of the group hear each other express affirming remarks, group solidarity is built. And as the article suggests, affirming negative opinions seems more potent. Knowing that we all have a common view on this one topic builds a basis for cohesion as we move on to more interaction. It isn't just a philosophical excercise to challenge the remark, it is a threat to group solidarity.

That leaves a dissenter in a difficult place, espeically if he has been public at all with a differing view. If you join in with the affirming chorus, then you may soon be outed as a hypocrite. If you challenge the remark, then you will be seen as a troublemaker. If you say nothing, then your views may later be discovered and you will be percieved as being decietful. It is a bit of a minefield.

Another layer to this is that sometimes the person inititating the remark knows that a member(s) of the group has differing views. By making the disparaging remark, she signals others to rally to her flag with affirming remarks, putting the dissenter in an awkward or defensive posture. It is an attempt to dominate and enforce solidarity.

The idea that talking about others behind their backs and sharing a common disapproval of others generates social cohesion poses some challenging questions for discipleship. I once read that not every movement needs a god but every movement needs a Satan. I doubt it is possible to fully escape this dynamic. I have no easy answers. But I suspect if our aim is to love our neighbor as ourself, then maybe the first place to begin is by deeply listening to our casual conversations, conciously evaluating what we intend to accomplish with the views we express in any given context.

Learning to Fail Fast (in the church)

Lewis Center for Church Leadership: Learning to Fail Fast

"... Petrie advocates what he calls “vertical development” or the advancement in a person’s capacity to think in “more complex, systemic, strategic, and interdependent ways (in contrast to horizontal development that adds knowledge, skills, and competencies). New leaders must think differently before they can act differently.

Often the qualities we see in church leaders are precisely those most associated with a low level of vertical development (dependent/conformer) — team player, faithful follower, reliant on authority, seeks direction, and aligns with others. A smaller number function at the next level (independent/achiever) — independent thinker, self-directed, drives an agenda, takes a stand for what they believe, and guided by an internal compass. But today’s need is for the more highly developed independent/collaborator leader characterized as interdependent thinker; sees systems, patterns, and connections; longer-term thinking; holds multi-frame perspectives; and holds contradictions.

The new leader must be far more adaptable to changing circumstances. Collaboration is essential in order to span boundaries and develop networks. Leaders will need to be much more comfortable with ambiguity in order to be always looking for clues and patterns in the changing landscape. Just as important, this new way of leading must move beyond leaders to affect the entire organizational culture of the church. Congregations need to expect incomplete solutions, much trial and error, and a great deal of learning about themselves and their contexts. ..."

Amen. Reading this post brought to mind an article I read about Microsoft's evolving process of software development. It used to be that Microsoft developed an operating system, released it, and then tried to stabilize it over the next three years. In the meantime, the next system was being designed, but you were mostly stuck with a given format for three years. It was much like building a house and moving in until you moved again in three years, and for that reason each house had to be delivered pretty much as a fully functional operational house when you moved in. Now operating systems have ongoing updates. There are still occasional major revisions but there is also constant evolution and correction. The church has got think more that way as well. The article is somewhat lengthy but an interesting read: How Microsoft dragged its development practices into the 21st century

Global Poverty Is on the Decline, But Almost No One Believes It

Barna: Global Poverty Is on the Decline, But Almost No One Believes It

April 29, 2014—Did you know that, in the past 30 years, the percentage of people in the world who live in extreme poverty has decreased by more than half?

If you said no—if you thought the number had gone up; that more people, not less, live in extreme poverty—you aren't alone. According to a recent Barna Group survey, done in partnership with Compassion International and the new book Hope Rising by Dr. Scott Todd, more than eight in 10 Americans (84%) are unaware global poverty has reduced so drastically. More than two-thirds (67%) say they thought global poverty was on the rise over the past three decades.

Similarly, while both child deaths and deaths caused by HIV/AIDS have decreased worldwide, many Americans wrongly think these numbers are on the rise: 50% of US adults believe child deaths have increased since 1990, and 35% believe deaths from HIV/AIDS have increased in the past five years.

Despite the very real good news, more than two-thirds of US adults (68%) say they do not believe it's possible to end extreme global poverty within the next 25 years. Sadly, concern about extreme global poverty—defined in this study as the estimated 1.4 billion people in countries outside the US who do not have access to clean water, enough food, sufficient clothing and shelter, or basic medicine like antibiotics—has declined from 21% in 2011 to 16% in 2013.

How does this sense of fatalism about global economic and health issues affect Americans' view of the developing world? Does it hinder charitable giving? And are Christians' views any different? ...

Interesting research. One of things I found interesting was how people who regularly attend church are more interested in globlal poverty and more involved in addressing it than those who don't go to church.

Mission Trips: On Avoiding the Dark Side

I have a deep suspicion, at times cynicism, about short-term mission trips. Some of you already know this about me. I say this with reservation because I know so many people who say a short-term mission trip was so transformative for them (though I do remember reading a study awhile back that said these trips have lasting impact on precious few people.) So while I can freely admit that these trips have positive merits there are two things that deeply disturb me. One is concern for the dignity and welfare of the poor who are supposedly being "helped" and the other is the all to frequent experiential consumerism I fear I hear in those who take these trips.

Rafia Zakaria has an excellent op ed piece in Aljeezra America, The white tourist’s burden. "Growing Western demand for altruistic vacations is feeding the white-savior industrial complex." She writes:

... If designer clothes and fancy cars signal material status, his story of a deliberate embrace of poverty and its discomforts signals superiority of character. As summer looms, many Americans — college students, retirees and others who stand at the cusp of life changes — will make similar choices in search of transformational experiences. An industry exists to make these easier to make: the voluntourism business.

A voluntourist is someone like Jack, who wishes to combine exotic vacation travel with volunteer work. For anyone interested in being one, a dizzying array of choices awaits, from building schools in Uganda or houses in Haiti to hugging orphans in Bali. In all of them, the operational equation is the same: wealthy Westerners can do a little good, experience something that their affluent lives do not offer, and, as in Jack’s case, have a story to tell that places them in the ranks of the kindhearted and worldly wise.

As admirably altruistic as it sounds, the problem with voluntourism is its singular focus on the volunteer’s quest for experience, as opposed to the recipient community’s actual needs....

It troubles me that the central aim is often not on discerning how to partner with others in order to authentically improve well-being. Rather the aim is for the volunteer to have a particular type of "experience" that is meaningful to him or her. That is not to say authentic partnership can't be meaningful but it is to say that true partnership is frequently frustrating, messy, and at times disappointing. Partnership is also long-term. The traveler is often actually a consumer, purchasing an experience for his or her own therapeutic purposes.

It troubles me further that for volunteers on these trips, the experience becomes a type of conspicuous consumption. Just like sporting my new iPhone shows off my techie style, talking about my noble experience working with the poor becomes a way of sporting my superior moral character and street smarts. And what really troubles me most is that I can identify these traits in my own life at times and I am deeply aware of how seductive this stuff is.

But the problem doesn't end here. As Zakaria shows, too often these trips are actually disruptive and destructive of the long-term welfare of the people being "helped." They can destroy jobs, break-up families, and foster dependence. This type of work needs to be carefully scrutinized but far too often good intentions are thought to be enough. Due diligence and serious introspection is needed.

Zakaria rightly concludes:

Despite its flaws, the educational aspect of voluntourism’s cross-cultural exchange must be saved, made better instead of being rejected completely. Natalie Jesionka, a columnist at the Daily Muse, offers future voluntourists some direction on making a real impact on their trips. ...

Two book length resources I would suggest are Corbett and Fikkert's When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor . . . and Yourself, and Bob Lupton's, Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help, And How to Reverse It.

Two-thirds of churched adults say it has been at least three years or more since they heard church teachings on work and career

Barna Group: Three Trends on Faith, Work and Calling

I'm two months slow in posting this article but it is important.

... Barna Group's new research shows that three-quarters of U.S. adults (75%) say they are looking for ways to live a more meaningful life. Whether such meaning is found in family, career, church, side projects or elsewhere, these are all questions of vocation—that is, the way in which people feel "called" to certain types of work and life choices. And in 2014, these questions remain as strong as ever for millions of Americans

Among Christians, there is an additional question: "What does God want me to do with my life?" According to Barna Group's study, only 40% of practicing Christians say they have a clear sense of God's calling on their lives. Christian Millennials are especially sensitive to this divine prompting—nearly half (48%) say they believe God is calling them to different work, yet they haven't yet made such a change.

Sermons are commonly preached on evangelism, discipleship, and spiritual disciplines—but what about vocation? It turns out that most churchgoers are craving more direction and discipleship when it comes to the theology of calling, especially as it relates to work. Barna research shows nearly two-thirds of churched adults say it has been at least three years or more since they heard church teachings on work and career, and yet, the workplace is where most Americans spend a the biggest share of their waking hours. ...

The implied message: Your work is irrelevant and without connection to you discipleship. Meaningful work is the purview of church institutions and only the work associated with "ministry" (evangelism, charity, and justice activities) is of value.

Does God Ordain Us to the Hardware Business?

I preached at Pine Ridge Presbyterian Church, in Kansas City, MO, on March 16, 2014. The sermon begins by wondering if it is appropriate to ordain people to the hardware business. The sermon text is Genesis 12:1-4 and the real issue is ministry of work in everyday life. I think this is the first time I have ever preached on this topic. See what you think.

PRPC Mar 16 2014 from Jay Waddell on Vimeo.

Revisiting Wealth - Bob Lupton

This is a from Bob Lupton, FCS Urban Ministries, in the Urban Perspectives newsletter. He is always thought provoking. This issue was especially good! (Note: Urban Perspectives allows copying these articles if attritbtion is given.)

Revisiting Wealth

Wealth.  A sign of God’s favor. At least that’s how it was viewed in Old Testament times.  Wealth was equated with prominence, influence, leadership, and yes, even righteousness.  Consider Job and Abraham.  Oh yes, there were evil and corrupt rich men to be sure.  The prophets took them on.  But generally riches were seen as evidence of God’s blessing.  That’s why the disciples were so puzzled by Jesus’ pronouncement that it was harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. “Well who can get in, if not the wealthy?!” they questioned.  It was clear that they viewed wealth like most other devout Jews – as a sign of God’s favor.  Their Teacher was casting an entirely new (and dubious) light on the nature of riches.

Money, power, prestige – these would no longer be the measures of prominence in this Kingdom Jesus was introducing.  Meekness, humility, compassion – these would become the defining attributes of greatness.  Rich people could certainly join, He said, but this new order of things would be difficult for them – difficult to divest their personal assets rather than contine to accumulate more, difficult to subordinate their privileged status to those of lesser social standing, difficult to place their security in God rather than in their wealth.  It would not be impossible, He said, just difficult.  Matthew the tax collector was case in point, and of course the very wealthy Zacchaeus.  Luke the physician was another.  But by and large the wealthy were relegated to lower standing in the pecking order of the Kingdom.  It was all upside down – the first being last and the last first.  Big change from Old Testament to New.

And so the value of being wealthy was turned on its ear.  The well-off became suspect.  It was a rich man who treated poor Lazarus poorly and was condemned to eternal damnation.  A rich young ruler too tied to his wealth to become a follower. A proud rich man in the Temple whose offering was unacceptable.  A successful farmer who took early retirement who was declared “a fool.”  Deceitful Ananias and Sapphira, tragic examples of rich folk who held out on God.  Wealth became associated with self-indulgence, with mercilessness, with arrogance, with fraudulence.  As a matter of fact, one is hard pressed to find a single reference in the New Testament affirming wealth as God’s blessing.  Warnings, yes, but no recognition of its essential role in Shalom.

But just behind the scenes, unmentioned but clearly present, were wealthy supporters of this Kingdom.  Zacchaeus was still one of the richest men in Jericho even after he made restitution and gave half his money to the poor.  And what about Matthew’s tax business and Luke’s medical practice?  And the women of means who supported the Messiah campaign?  And members of the early church that sold property to underwrite the church budget?  Oh yes, wealth was there alright.  It’s just that generosity and self-sacrifice and living by faith were the themes that got the sermon coverage.

But then, how could it be any different?  Everybody in the early church was readying for the eminent return of the Messiah.  Everyone was on a short-term schedule.  Don’t even get married, the apostle Paul urged.  Put all your energy into preparedness for the second coming.  But Christ didn’t return as expected.  (Not yet.)  And so in time everybody began settling into a new normal of church and community life, some thriving, others surviving.  The themes of generosity, self-sacrifice and living by faith imbedded themselves in the culture of the church.  Wealth remained suspect.  The apostle James made quite sure that the rich were not shown deference.

And so the issue churns.  Those who create wealth continue to receive the warnings while those modest souls who live off the benefits of the economy that wealth-producers create receive the affirmation.  John Coors, a very wealthy and very devout Christian, calls it an “industry of making the rich feel guilty.”  Billionaire Robert Kern, who loves the church but endures the judgment, has allocated a large portion of his estate to educating ministers in the fundamentals of how the economy works.

“Give it all away,” Jesus said.  Even your second coat.  Don’t concern yourself about tomorrow.  Budgeting?   Trust a miracle.  Hmm.  Does the One who holds the economies of the world in his hand not realize that thoughtful planning and responsible investing are essential for stable societies?  Was it not He who gave the promise of prosperity to Israel if they would keep His commands?  Was He not the One who warned Joseph in a dream about seven years of famine that would befall Egypt, and positioned him to plan ahead during seven years of plenty?  How then are we to understand this radical “take-no-thought-for-tomorrow” departure from divinely guided resource management?

He came to fulfill the law, not do away with it, He said.  Don’t abandon the God-given teachings and principles of the past – take them to a deeper level.  The blessing of wealth is meant for the Shalom of the entire community, not to be hoarded for personal sumptuousness.  Managed well, it provides a stable lifestyle for a workforce and their families, stimulates ancillary enterprises, contributes to the prosperity of the whole village or region.  No, He did not come to destroy Shalom but to inspire it.  Admittedly, He did use some highly provocative words and actions to shake up a religious culture that was misusing wealth to amass personal power, privilege and possessions.  Scattering stacks of money-changers’ cash all over the Temple portico floor was a bit extreme perhaps.  But sometimes dramatic intervention is required when greed and self-indulgence become acceptable norms within the Temple community.  And He certainly did that!

But perhaps the time has come to bring theological balance back to our understanding of wealth.  2000 years of cautions for those who have the gift of wealth creation may be an adequate length of time to make the point that mammon is seductive, that one’s heart must be carefully guarded against its enticements.  At a time when the entire world is awakening to the reality that healthy economic systems are fundamental to the elimination of extreme poverty, perhaps this is a moment for resourced members of the Western church – who have unparalleled capacity to create profitable businesses – to step forward.  Perhaps this is the time when the church begins to see itself as more than a purveyor of compassionate service, but as a catalyst of just and fruitful economies.   Might this be a turning point when the wealthiest church in history awakens to the reality that their job creators are the very ones gifted by God to bring economic wholeness to struggling souls too long resigned to unending poverty?

Should Christians Really Stop Saying This?

A Facebook friend linked this article this week, The One Thing Christians Should Stop Saying. I get the gist of what he is saying but I also have reservations. He is a businessperson and tells of how a friend asked how his business was going. He answered with his usual response:

"Definitely feeling blessed. Last year was the best year yet for my business. And it looks like this year will be just as busy."

But on further reflection he has concluded that it is wrong for him to say that. Two reasons:

... First, when I say that my material fortune is the result of God's blessing, it reduces The Almighty to some sort of sky-bound, wish-granting fairy who spends his days randomly bestowing cars and cash upon his followers. I can't help but draw parallels to how I handed out M&M's to my own kids when they followed my directions and chose to poop in the toilet rather than in their pants. Sure, God wants us to continually seek His will, and it's for our own good. But positive reinforcement?

God is not a behavioral psychologist.

Second, and more importantly, calling myself blessed because of material good fortune is just plain wrong. For starters, it can be offensive to the hundreds of millions of Christians in the world who live on less than $10 per day. You read that right. Hundreds of millions who receive a single-digit dollar "blessing" per day. ...

He goes on to talk about the beatitudes and talks about how it is the poor and the marginalized who are described as blessed. He concludes noting:

My blessing is this. I know a God who gives hope to the hopeless. I know a God who loves the unlovable. I know a God who comforts the sorrowful. And I know a God who has planted this same power within me. Within all of us.

And for this blessing, may our response always be,

"Use me."

Since I had this conversation, my new response is simply, "I'm grateful." Would love to hear your thoughts.

There is a lot of truth in this. I find myself strongly identifying with his observations ... and yet ...

What about passages like Deut 8:17-19:

“17 Do not say to yourself, "My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth." 18 But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your ancestors, as he is doing today.” NRSV

I have been in small groups with countless businesspeople and entrepreneurs. What I hear from so many of them is a deep gratefulness for the opportunity to express what they understand as a God-given gift for creativity. They feel gratefulness because they can benefit their customers, their workers, their families, and, yes, themselves. When I hear them talk about being blessed, I don’t hear them saying, “I did all the right stuff, now see how God rewarded me.” Most are intensely aware of their shortcomings, they make endless mistakes, and yet they are still here in their businesses. They sense God’s presence with them in their work but I don’t get the sense that they think that those whose businesses fail do so because of a lack of God’s presence. They know people who have done everything seemingly right and don’t make it. They feel blessed in the sense that in God’s grand scheme of things, they are where they are.

What I worry about is the compartmentalization of our faith and the business world. If the businessperson claims all credit for achieving success in creating a sustainable profitable business, then we chastise her for attributing success to herself alone. But if she talks about being blessed in her work (i.e., God had a hand in her success), then that also is taboo because she is saying God withheld blessing from someone else who didn’t do well. In short, if you are in business, then you are only entitled to have vague feelings of gratefulness but not to see God as present in your daily life.

I’m not saying that the way "blessing" is used is without abuse. Someone in the comments section of the article talked about "blessed to be a blessing" as a corrective and I think that has merit. But I worry that the thinking in this article just drives a deeper wedge between faith and daily life. Maybe I read too much between the lines but it seems to me that the thinking here is evidence of a deep ambivalence so much of the church has about business and the people who make their living there.

Any thoughts?

A Happy Life May not be a Meaningful Life

Scientific American: A Happy Life May not be a Meaningful Life

Tasks that seem mundane, or even difficult, can bring a sense of meaning over time.

Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl once wrote, “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.” For most people, feeling happy and finding life meaningful are both important and related goals. But do happiness and meaning always go together? It seems unlikely, given that many of the things that we regularly choose to do – from running marathons to raising children – are unlikely to increase our day-to-day happiness. Recent research suggests that while happiness and a sense of meaning often overlap, they also diverge in important and surprising ways. ...

... Interestingly, their findings suggest that money, contrary to popular sayings, can indeed buy happiness. Having enough money to buy what one needs in life, as well as what one desires, were also positively correlated with greater levels of happiness. However, having enough money seemed to make little difference in life’s sense of meaning. This same disconnect was recently found in a multi-national study conducted by Shigehiro Oishi and Ed Diener, who show that people from wealthy countries tend to be happier, however, they don’t see their lives as more meaningful. In fact, Oishi and Diener found that people from poorer countries tend to see their lives as more meaningful. ...

... Participants in the study who were more likely to agree with the statement, “I am a giver,” reported less happiness than people who were more likely to agree with, “I am a taker.” However, the “givers” reported higher levels of meaning in their lives compared to the “takers.” In addition, spending more time with friends was related to greater happiness but not more meaning. ...

... It is clear that a highly meaningful life may not always include a great deal of day-to-day happiness. And, the study suggests, our American obsession with happiness may be intimately related to a feeling of emptiness, or a life that lacks meaning.

Fascinating article. It made me think of two guys talking about a friend who had bought a $1,000 tie. The first guy says, "Buying that tie won't be him happiness." The second guy says, "Sure it will ... for about 24 hours."

It strikes me that happiness is more fleeting and driven by immediate circumstances while meaning has greater resilience, not easily influenced by the immediate circumstances of any given moment. I also expect, as hinted at the end of the article, that what many of us are genuinely persuing is meaning but mistaking happiness for meaning. I wonder if there is a role for the church in all of this? ;-)

 

Muhammad Yunus On Defining Success With Money: 'That's The Wrong Way'

Yunus' take on social business and defining success with money.

Why Am I Not Poor?

Christianity Today: Why Am I Not Poor? Dale Hanson Bourke

For many years I sat in a pew on Sundays, listening to occasional sermons about the poor, giving to special offerings and looking appropriately sympathetic and concerned about poverty. But I did not truly—in evangelical speak—have a heart for the poor.

For much of the rest of the week I was consumed with not being poor. I was working to build my business, increase profits, and move up the wealth ladder. I reasoned that the more money I made, the more I could help my church and other worthy organizations. While I heard Christian concern expressed about poverty, the stronger message was that I was rewarded for accumulating wealth. The farther I moved away from poverty, the more I was asked to join church committees and nonprofit boards. The poor may be "blessed," but the wealthy are popular, especially in Christian circles.

As a woman business owner, I was sometimes asked to speak about my experience. I usually gave a nod to good timing, luck, and being blessed. But I mostly talked about hard work, determination, and focus. My upbeat message was aimed at helping others realize that they, too, could succeed. In retrospect, the subtext was a not so subtle "God helps those who help themselves" theme.

My worldview began to change when I joined the World Vision board and traveled to the developing world. There I met men and women who were remarkably hard working, determined, and focused. I spent time with women who cared for their families and also worked at other jobs from before sun up until dark. I encountered people who were intelligent, entrepreneurial, and absolutely ingenious at overcoming obstacles. And despite all of these attributes, they were still numbingly poor.

For the first time in my life, I actually knew desperately poor people. The more I listened to their stories the more it became obvious to me that if there was a difference between us it was that they worked even harder than I ever had. I remember standing next to a woman in a Haitian slum, watching her cook with one hand, care for her baby with the other, and occasionally use her cooking spoon to defend her one room shack from the dogs and young men who threatened to take the little food she had. With stunning clarity, I realized that I could never survive in such circumstances, let alone succeed. ...

... Much of what I had taken for granted in my life took on new meaning when I compared myself to some of the people I had met and noted our differences. My list included:

• I had access to a good education. ...
• I am healthy. ...
• As a woman, I am protected by the law and society. ...
• Insurance protects me from disaster. ...
• I live in a stable country. ...
• I have access to capital and can save my money. ...
• I am part of a growing economy. ...
• I was born into middle-class suburbia. ...

Good stuff!

Why the Church Needs Business

Huffington Post: Why the Church Needs Business

... Beyond the mess that has been the Vatican bank, the Catholic Church can learn a lot from business. This may seem counterintuitive, but the same church that has (rightly) spoken out so forcefully on the excesses and the limitations of capitalism desperately needs some capitalistic skills.

How is it that so many seem to have so little expertise in what so many people take for granted? Not long after the financial crisis in 2008, one priest confidently told me, "Capitalism is dead." I asked him if he could still go to the corner and buy a hotdog. Yes, he said. "That's capitalism," I said. "It's not dead." A few days later another priest with a Ph.D. asked me, as he read about the financial crisis, "What's a bond?"

Whence the lack of business knowledge among otherwise smart and talented (and highly educated) men and women? There are two simple reasons:

First, many cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests, sisters and brothers now in their 60s and 70s (that is, those running things in the church) often entered their seminaries or religious orders right out of college, even high school. Thus, many (not all, but many) did not have the important experience of having to earn a paycheck, balance a checkbook, manage employees, read a balance sheet, invest in the stock market, and so on.

The second reason is more basic. Once in the seminary or religious order, business education was not a part of their training. This is an immense lacuna in the training or priests and men and women in religious orders. ...

In How the Church Fails Businesspeople (and what can be done about), John Knapp reports that one of the biggest obstacles the church has with influencing businesspeople to think more ethically and theologically about their own lives is the business practices of the church. A congregation's or denomination's sloppiness with finances, belief that fundamentally realities about business and economics can just magically be suspended, and, too often, defensiveness (if not hostility) toward sound business practices, causes businesspeople to tune out what the church has to say about material matters. The church holds no credibility. It is good to see that Pope Francis is recognizing the need for the gifted businesspeople to aid in the mission of the church.

How Pope Francis Misunderstands the World

Atlantic: How Pope Francis Misunderstands the World

We're living at a far more equal, peaceful, and prosperous time than the pontiff acknowledges....

Pope Francis is Times’ Person of the Year, an excellent pick in my estimation. He strikes me as man with incredible integrity. I’m enjoying watching him live into this new calling.

Of particular interest to me has been response to his Evangelii Gaudium, with the left gleeful about his condemnation of capitalism and the right going apoplectic about the same. In our age of bumper sticker sound bites, I don’t think either side is listening with appropriate nuance. I haven’t read and digested the whole document but I have read the sections that deal with economic issues. I don’t see a radical departure with what previous Pope’s have written.

Twenty years ago Pope John Paul II wrote the following in Centesimus Annus:

Can it perhaps be said that after the failure of communism capitalism is the victorious social system and the capitalism is the victorious social system and that capitalism should be the goal of the countries now making efforts to rebuild their economy and society? Is this model which ought to be proposed to the countries of the Third World which are searching for the path of true economic and civil progress?

The answer is obviously complex. If by “capitalism” is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property, and the resulting responsibility for the means of production as well as free creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a “business economy,” “market economy,” or simply “free economy.” But if by “capitalism” is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative. (Centesimus Annus, 42)

I don’t find Pope Francis saying a great deal different although his emphasis may be a little different. We need to remember that John Paul II ministered under the tyranny of Soviet Communism while Francis did so under the tyranny of right-wing dictatorship. These differences are surely a factor.

The part that does trouble me some, as it does with an overwhelming number of religious figures who speak to economic issues, is a distorted picture of what is happening in the world. It isn’t what is said. It’s what’s missing. For the past century or two we have been living through the most astonishing surge in human flourishing in history. That reality needs to be brought into discussion every bit as much as the challenges and the injustices.

David Ropeik in How Risky Is It Really: Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts shows that we are innately inclined to fixate on threats and negative developments. People who do so aren’t stupid or ideological … they are human. All of us do it. The inclination to focus on threats is instinctive and has served human beings well over millennia. But in the face of very complex issues we need to bring our concerns into perspective with more objective analysis. Otherwise we run the risk of doing more harm than good. We need to approach problems with warm hearts and cool heads.

I have some minor quibbles with Tupy in the article but it brings important balance. I’ve documented some similar factors in past series like American Social Indicators and World Social Indicators, two series I intend to update next year. I think the challenge is to hear the Pope’s important calls for inclusion of the poor and his warning against our propensity to justify indifference. Not heeding the Pope's warnings is also to misunderstand the world. But we need to heed the warnings with an informed understanding of what is unfolding in the world. Read the Atalantic article and see what you think.

We Interrupt Budget Negotiations for This Observation

A momentary aside from the budget negotiations.

Remember after the Gabby Giffords shooting three years ago? Some people seized on violent metaphors by conservatives as an impetus for the shooting (like Sarah Palin putting crosshairs over the faces of candidates she opposed at her website). Other recent incidents have been framed in similar ways. President Obama made a speech about the need to avoid violent rhetoric in public discourse.

I’ve noted before that use of violent metaphors is a bipartisan behavior. That usually gets pushback from my left-leaning friends, saying that conservatives are far worse about this than liberals. I maintain it is worse with whichever camp is most aggrieved at the moment. On that note, I invite you to listen during our present troubles to the rhetoric of liberals, Democrats, and the President, as they talk about the Republicans as “terrorists,” “hostage takers,” and “suicide bombers,” with bombs strapped to their chest, ready to “blow up the government.”  

ALL of us have a tendency, when hearing violent metaphors, to overly ascribe malevolence to people with whom we disagree and to discount it when uttered by those with whom we agree. When it is used toward people with whom we agree, we tend to take it personally. When it is used toward people with whom we disagree, we are less critical. The metaphors give voice to our anger and frustration. For that reason, if we are unable to achieve some emotional distance from the fray, as so many of us seem unable to do, we genuinely perceive that other tribes are meaner.

Personally, while I agree violent metaphors can become excessive, I don’t generally find them troubling. Jesus used them. “I will make you fishers of men.” Ever thought about this from the fish's standpoint? The Kingdom of God is where people get violently snatched from their lives, killed, and then consumed by their captors? Or how about Paul writing to the Galatians that he wished the Judaizers had cut the whole thing off during circumcision? Ouch! Violent metaphors are a part of everyday speech that, when used sparingly and appropriately, give voice to our emotional state. (However, they aren’t so effective in persuasion.) So while I agree that we see many public figures going over the top with this stuff, let us also admit that there is also a lot of posturing to show just how evil and insane the other tribe is with their violent rhetoric while ignoring our own.

You may now return to your news coverage of the budget negotiations. As for me, I’m focusing on the road to the World Series and cheering for the Cardinals to totally annihilate each of their adversaries … but in a Christ-like manner.

Church is not Worship, Community, or Mission. It's All Three

Rachel Young has a thoughtful article at the The Presbyterian Outlook's Outpost blog titled, Consumers, missionaries, or worshipers? She writes:

... We use the language of buying and selling, of efficiency, of getting the best product for the best price, even as we think about our relationships, our work, our leisure, our church.  We are consumers.

I don't have space in this post to offer evidence for these big claims.  Check out Hugh Halter and Matt Smay's book And: The Gathered and Scattered Church for an evaluation of how this metaphor seeps into churches.  The consumer metaphor invites us to seek church experiences that fit our interests and time.  We go to church to get our spiritual needs met.  If I were to modify the answer to the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism (see below for the actual answer), the consumer might say, "Man's chief end is to connect with God by listening to a great message and hearing great music." ...

So maybe, as some suggest, a better metaphor is missionary. She writes:

... So, we might modify the Westminster Shorter Catechism to say, "Man's chief end is to partner with God to redeem and restore our hurting world."

The missionary metaphor compels me.  But, what I find lacking in both of these metaphors is the primacy of worship.  Is the gathering of a church only functional?  To give people a feel good experience or to shape them as missionaries?  Or, are the people of God called first to worship God and then be sent?  The first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism actually reads, "Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever."

I hear her concerns and I know they are widely shared. I hear similar concerns expressed across the church. But I think pitting these various metahpors against each other, or prioritizing one over the other, IS the problem. I commented in response:

I like how Stan Ott talks about church as three-dimensional: doxological, koinonial, and missional. Or more simply: worship, community, and mission. The three are inseparable. I think classifying desire for a meaningful worship experience as consumerist is overly harsh. It is pursuit of that experience above all else that is destructive. I would also say that pursuit of worship as prior, or over and above the other two, is problematic.

Genuine worship draws us into community and inspires us to mission. Genuine community is worshipful and it is in community that we discern and do mission. Mission is a worshipful response to God and deepens us in community as we do it together. All three aspects must be held together.

There is an ongoing debate in the church about a (false) dichotomy of community (and personal nourishment) versus mission. I sense some want to lift "worship" up as the "third way" out of this conflict. Instead, I suggest that the answer is to boldly embrace all three.

The Gospels of Sin Management

Jesus Creed: The Gospels of Sin Management and Their Empty Allegiance

American evangelicalism is what it is because of its gospel. Dallas Willard calls its gospel the “gospel of sin management.” American liberal Protestantism is what it is because of its gospel. Dallas Willard also calls its gospel the gospel of sin management. (Some of you will know I call this gospel the “soterian” gospel in The King Jesus Gospel.) Its emphases — right and left — is forgiveness of sin, eternal life in heaven, assurance in the here and now, and either an act (decision) or acts (good deeds) are the precipitating element that gains a person access to salvation. ...

... They have an “empty allegiance” to Jesus. You’re in whether are a transformed into Christlikeness or not. ...

... On the Right, the gospel is “vampire faith” (they want Jesus for his blood), it is shaped by atonement theology and obsessed with atonement theology, and it is about “relief from the intrapsychic terrors of fundamentalist versions of hell” (149).

On the Left, the gospel is about “good acts” and activism and “self-determined acts of righteousness” (149). So the Right is about proper beliefs and the Left about proper behaviors. The gospel is about conformity to Christ in a God-bathed kingdom reality. ...

My comment in response:

I think part of the solution is recovery of the significance of everyday life and work. The primary locus of ministry for most of us is our home, our workplace, and our neighborhood. It is with and for those who are in our circle of influence. And when I say "ministry" here, I don't mean using these contexts as staging opportunities for evangelism (though evangelism will occur) or as opportunities right injustices (though righting injustices will occur). I mean seeing our participation in these aspects of life, the living and work that is done there, as integral with serving God.

I think it needs to be noted that the soterian gospel of the right and left places the locus of "ministry" in the pastors and ecclesiastic institutions, elevating the centrality and importance of those connected with these institutions. Conscious or not, there is considerable psychic investment to keep things the way the are because of the affirmation and status it brings. The rest of church becomes amateur helpers to the evangelism/justice professionals, which is okay by many of them because they can go do their good deeds as prescribed by the professionals while living most of the rest of their lives as practical atheists. All in all, an effective codependency.

Do Nice People Succeed In Business? It Depends

Forbes: Do Nice People Succeed In Business? It Depends

... So much for everyday life—how about the business world? That’s where Adam Grant’s Give and Take comes in. Many people implicitly think that niceness is a virtue for the rest of life, but when it comes to playing business hardball, only the selfish survive. The message of Grant’s book is that this isn’t true, and he gives us both scientific evidence and entertaining profiles for understanding why. Grant divides people into three behavioral categories: givers, matchers, and takers. As their names imply, givers are sweeties who unstintingly share their time and talent, seemingly for the sheer pleasure of it. Matchers calibrate their giving to their taking, and takers take whatever they can get. Who does best playing business hardball? It turns out that the givers do best and worst. When they succumb to the depredations of takers, they become doormats and chumps. But when they manage to work with other givers, they produce spectacular wealth and share the collective benefits. In other words, the costs and benefits of prosociality in the business world are no different than for the rest of life. ...

... In a video interview with one of us (David S. Wilson), Grant said that Wharton students are constantly coming into his office expressing a desire to give, which they assume must be suppressed in their business lives until they make a fortune. Only then can they express their desire to give by becoming philanthropists. If that’s the way that business school students think, then the message of Grant’s book is indeed revolutionary. We need to exchange lenses to see that giving can succeed as a business strategy from day one, as long as givers can keep their distance from takers. Businesses flourish when they create social environments that allow niceness to generate value, thereby winning the Darwinian contest.

Rising Wealth May Have Made Americans Less Generous

Business Insider: Rising Wealth May Have Made Americans Less Generous

... Using Google's Ngram tool, Patricia Greenfield sifted through more than 1 million books published in the U.S. over the last two centuries to see which kinds of words went in and out of favor. The time period shows a shift in American society from a more rural way of life to a boom in urban populations, which tend to be wealthier and better educated.

Over time, she found words that implied individualism increased in use, while words denoting community and generosity decreased. For example, 'get' has increased in use, while the more generous 'give' took a nose dive over the years. Additionally, "words that would show an individualistic orientation became more frequent," Greenfield told NPR. "Examples of those words were 'individual,' 'self,' 'unique.'" ...

 On a related topic, John Teevan has a good post, 10 Perils of Prosperity.

So Why is Sustained Prosperity a Peril? Nearly everyone on earth prefers a life free from poverty and from the need to focus on survival. Call it liberty or call it comfort, everyone prefers this life. Now nearly 2b people enjoy that level of living thanks to the growth of economic freedom. But there are problems.

1. People think that nothing can go permanently wrong. Money cures everything and there is plenty of it and always will be. Period.
2. People think that all moral issues are irrelevant. Ask Miley Cyrus…the latest casualty who is also a Disney role model: see #9.
3. People think that they can afford anything and suddenly want everything. So the richest people on earth fuel their lives with even more debt financed stuff. ...

David Fitch on a New "Order" of Clergy

Reclaiming the Mission: Create a New ‘Order’ of Clergy: A Recommendation to Denominations - David Fitch

... I suggest there is a need for a new order of clergy (if I may call it that): a missional leader who can understand the relationship between work and ministry so that it is seamless. He or she dedicates 10-15 hours a week to organizing the Kingdom community in their local context.  He or she knows her gifting and can lead out of that gifting. He or she has a job that he/she can support her/himself and her family with. He/she can develop a job skill that can adapt to changing circumstances. Often, he or she adjust their work hours so that she can work a tad less than the average 40 hour week. He or she can then give time to the leadership of their community without disrupting a daily/weekly rhythm of being present with family and neighborhood as well. The small church community can offer a small stipend to make up the difference. He or she does all this with 3 to 4 other leaders who do the same. Each is recognized for one of the five-fold giftings out of which they minister and lead in relation to the other leaders. They are apostle, prophet, pastor-organizer, teacher-organizer, evangelist working together, 15 hours plus 15 hours, plus 15 hours, plus 15 hours plus 15 hours. They are doing more out of multiple giftings than one single pastor ever could. They are bearing each other’s burdens. They are a “band of brothers and sisters.” This becomes a sustainable missionary kind of ministry that changes the whole dynamics of ministry because they are present in jobs, families and neighborhoods and makes possible long term ministry in context. It is, in essence, a new version of the old monastic orders of mission adapted to the capitalistic societies in the West while providing the means to resist (and provide witness) to its more oppressive sinful patterns.

Denominations need to define a new order of clergy because anyone seeking to operate in ministry this way will easily get defeated. Some of the more obvious ways they will get defeated are: ...

... For all these reasons we need to fund a new imagination for a new emerging clergy class that are in essence self sustaining contextual N. American missionaries. But the denominations for the most part have not navigated this. My guess is, if the denominations formed a new order of clergy, helped developed imagination and supporting structures for it, there would be untold numbers flocking to this group. There are literally thousands of second career people, and thousands of younger seminary graduates  dissatisfied with current options (dying small church senior pastor or mega church staff person) who would gravitate towards this kind of commissioning.  But we have no larger imagination for it. A new order of clergy could help and support these kind of missionaries and stir up such an imagination. Such an order of clergy could seed a whole new mission for a renewal of the Kingdom in N America. ...

Scientific Advice On How To Spend Your Dollar To Buy The Most Happiness

Business Insider: Scientific Advice On How To Spend Your Dollar To Buy The Most Happiness

... When we ask people to list all of their expenses in a given month, and then categorize them, it is always striking how much of their budget goes toward buying what we call—using the scientific term—stuff. Gadgets, music, books, lattes, and so on. As it turns out, buying stuff is not bad for our happiness—buying coffees and cars and even houses don’t make us unhappy—but stuff also doesn’t make us any happier. Buying experiences, in comparison, does seem to create more happiness for every dollar spent. Why? Consider the difference between buying a TV and buying a vacation. TV is great, sure, but the experience of watching TV pales in comparison to the experience of going to a special meal once a week with a partner or friend. A $4,000 high-end TV may seem like a great purchase, but taking that chunk of cash and devoting it to buying experiences (say, 40 wonderful meals that cost $100 each) creates much more happiness. And what’s more, we watch TV alone, but we eat dinner with others. The increase in social interaction—a key predictor of people’s happiness—means that experiences generally offer greater happiness bang for the buck than material goods. ...

...We often think about giving gifts to others as increasing the happiness of the recipient. Again, think of kids opening their gifts on Christmas morning… Our research, however, shows that gift giving offers benefits to an unexpected group: the givers themselves. In experiments we’ve conducted in countries ranging from the United States to South Africa, from Canada to Uganda, we consistently find that spending money on other people—whether buying gifts for friends or donating to charity—provides people with much more happiness than spending that money on themselves. ...

The Gospel According to ‘Me’

New York Times: The Gospel According to ‘Me’

The booming self-help industry, not to mention the cash cow of New Age spirituality, has one message: be authentic! Charming as American optimism may be, its 21st-century incarnation as the search for authenticity deserves pause. The power of this new version of the American dream can be felt through the stridency of its imperatives: Live fully! Realize yourself! Be connected! Achieve well-being!

Despite the frequent claim that we are living in a secular age defined by the death of God, many citizens in rich Western democracies have merely switched one notion of God for another — abandoning their singular, omnipotent (Christian or Judaic or whatever) deity reigning over all humankind and replacing it with a weak but all-pervasive idea of spirituality tied to a personal ethic of authenticity and a liturgy of inwardness. The latter does not make the exorbitant moral demands of traditional religions, which impose bad conscience, guilt, sin, sexual inhibition and the rest.

Unlike the conversions that transfigure the born-again’s experience of the world in a lightning strike, this one occurred in stages: a postwar existentialist philosophy of personal liberation and “becoming who you are” fed into a 1960s counterculture that mutated into the most selfish conformism, disguising acquisitiveness under a patina of personal growth, mindfulness and compassion. Traditional forms of morality that required extensive social cooperation in relation to a hard reality defined by scarcity have largely collapsed and been replaced with this New Age therapeutic culture of well-being that does not require obedience or even faith — and certainly not feelings of guilt. Guilt must be shed; alienation, both of body and mind, must be eliminated, most notably through yoga practice after a long day of mind-numbing work.

In the gospel of authenticity, well-being has become the primary goal of human life. Rather than being the by-product of some collective project, some upbuilding of the New Jerusalem, well-being is an end in itself. The stroke of genius in the ideology of authenticity is that it doesn’t really require a belief in anything, and certainly not a belief in anything that might transcend the serene and contented living of one’s authentic life and baseline well-being. In this, one can claim to be beyond dogma. ...

Why Some Companies Seem To Last Forever

Business Insider: Why Some Companies Seem To Last Forever

... What explains this longevity? Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor Charles O’Reilly calls it "organizational ambidexterity": the ability of a company to manage its current business while simultaneously preparing for changing conditions. "You often see successful organizations failing, and it's not obvious why they should fail," O’Reilly says. The reason, he says, is that a strategy that had been successful within the context of a particular time and place may suddenly be all wrong once the world changes.

Staying competitive, then, means changing what you're doing. But the change can't be an abrupt switch from old to new — from print to digital distribution, say, or from selling products to selling services — if that means abandoning a business that's still profitable. Hence the call for ambidexterity. You can't just choose between exploiting your current opportunities and exploring new ones; you have to do both. And the companies that last for decades are able to do so time and time again. ...

I think there is a message for congregations and denominations as well.

Why Those Who Feel They Have Less Give More

PBS: Why Those Who Feel They Have Less Give More

Dacher Keltner: We're starting to paint this really interesting picture of how wealth influences generosity. If you study at the societal level, who gives higher proportions of their income away to charity? Lower class people give more.

And what's really interesting is we're finding that lower class people just have a sharper sensitivity to need and to people who could use a little help. But when you simply prime, or you just get people from an upper class background, to think about the need in their environment, you see rises in generosity.

Paul Solman: Rises to the same extent that poorer people give away their money?

Dacher Keltner: Yeah. The very simple experiment that we've done is if we have upper class individuals going through an experience of compassion or see something that portrays suffering, you see rises in generosity to comparable levels of the poor. ...

... Dacher Keltner: Yeah, there's a lot of very deeply entrenched skepticism about altruism in western culture that goes back millennia, and one of the great advocates of this skepticism is Ayn Rand. I'll quote from her 1960 essay: "If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject." And she had this argument that thinking about the needs of others is an enemy of freedom, and strength and self-expression.

There are a lot of new data that show if you're generous, and charitable and altruistic, you'll live longer; you'll feel more fulfilled; you'll feel more expressive of who you are as a person; you probably will feel more control and freedom in your life. So the science calls that thesis into very deep question.

Paul Solman: And yet that's a thesis that has a lot of traction these days.

Dacher Keltner: It does, but, you know, I'm really encouraged by, you know, what's happening with the millennials and the interest that places like Facebook and Google are showing in terms of promoting charity and generosity and a consideration of other people's interests.

I'm lucky enough to be doing a bit of work on Facebook that's oriented towards making their site more compassionate, and they are actively interested in creating pieces of the social network that are for giving away things. So, it's going to be interesting to see if they deliver on that. ...

Business as Calling

Last summer I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Thom Thomson, professor of finance at the University of Texas. Dr. Thomson was in Toronto a week ago preaching at his brother's church, Every Nation, Greater Toronto. The topic was "Business as Calling." This is a wonderful presentation!  You can find the 30 sermon at Faith & the Marketplace Part 2: BUSINESS AS CALLING or by clicking below. For some reason my player indicates it will 78 minutes long but it is actually about 30 minutes. (Disclosure: At 11:40 into the sermon the author of the controversial Facebook post was me. I was intrigued that Dr. Thomson picked up on this post because I have privately used the responses to to the post as an example of the deep cynicism toward business held by so many theological professionals.):

Here is the sermon setup:

A leading personal finance magazine published its list of the 10 best fields of study based on the potential they had of offering a steady, well-paying career. Some of you may already be pursuing these studies or are in these business areas, such as Pharmacy and Pharmacology, Nursing, Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Management Information Systems and Treatment Therapy Professions.  As we read the New Testament in the Bible, we come across other popular professions: Jesus was a carpenter. Paul was a tentmaker. And Peter was a fisherman. All noble business pursuits providing a valuable service to the community and offering a means to make a good living. Our city – Toronto – is built on business. So how does faith enter the equation? Does it have a place? This week Dr. Thomas Thomson, a finance professor at the University of Texas, continues our series by giving us a fresh perspective on how faith can positively affect business and how business can be a worthy calling. Join us, and bring a friend, to Innis Town Hall at 10:30 a.m.

Mothers now top earners in 4 in 10 US households

AP: Mothers now top earners in 4 in 10 US households

WASHINGTON (AP) -- America's working mothers are now the primary breadwinners in a record 40 percent of households with children - a milestone in the changing face of modern families, up from just 11 percent in 1960.

The findings by the Pew Research Center, released Wednesday, highlight the growing influence of "breadwinner moms" who keep their families afloat financially. While most are headed by single mothers, a growing number are families with married mothers who bring in more income than their husbands.

Demographers say the change is all but irreversible and is likely to bring added attention to child-care policies as well as government safety nets for vulnerable families. Still, the general public is not at all sure that having more working mothers is a good thing. ...

 

You Can't Buy Your Way to Social Justice

Christianity Today: You Can't Buy Your Way to Social Justice

I'm afraid of some American Christians.

I am an American, but I haven't lived in the United States in a while. I live in Djibouti, a country in the Horn of Africa, and when you pick me up at the Minneapolis airport, I might invite you to coffee and suggest the wrong place—you know, one that doesn't serve fair-trade coffee. I will arrive wearing the wrong jeans—ones sold by companies that don't offer fair wages. And I won't use the right vocabulary—the language used by Western bloggers to talk about social justice. ...

... If my generation cares so deeply about global issues of justice and poverty that they are willing to change eating, clothing, and living habits, where are they? A significant challenge for nonprofits and ministries remains recruiting people who will commit to serve long-term outside the United States.

I know there are a plethora of good reasons that concerned American Christians can't just uproot and leave the States, from family to health to finances. I know I simplify. But I have a theory about what is partly contributing to the dearth of young Americans willing to spend their lives on behalf of others.

They think they already are.

They think that with their pocketbooks and food choices alone, by sewing their own clothes and purchasing fair-trade coffee, by boycotting Wal-Mart and preaching that as gospel, they have already done their part to address global injustices. ...

... Consumer activism comes with the inherent danger of separating us from the very people we want to serve. To buy fair trade coffee, for example, we might need to drive across town instead of sitting in the corner café where people in our neighborhood mingle. We can buy that fair trade coffee and never know the family in Burundi who grew, harvested, washed, and roasted the beans. And still we can feel that have done our part. ...

... While remaining passionate and continuing to gently educate the ignorant (like me!) about how our purchases affect the world, we also need to ask whether current trends are becoming a convenient excuse not to delve into the complexities of social justice. We need to ask whether our consumer choices distort the words of Jesus, and whether they help us enter relationships or separate us from others.

As Matthew Lee Anderson notes in his recent CT cover story, Christians begin to fulfill the command to love our neighbor as ourselves "not when we do something radical, extreme, over the top, not when we're really spiritual or really committed or really faithful, but when in the daily ebb and flow of life, in our corporate jobs, in our middle-class neighborhoods, on our trips to Yellowstone and Disney World . . . we stop to help those whom we meet in everyday life, reaching out in quiet, practical, and loving ways." ...

There are some people who are deeply committed to social justice but go about it in ways that I think misunderstands the issues involved. I do not doubt their commitment or their sincerity. But there are also wide swathes for whom identifying with a social justice cause as a fashion statement, an identity signifier, communicating to the world how enlightened and moral they are. Digging into the economic intricacies of fair trade coffee to see how ineffectual it is (even damaging) for the poor, or realizing that Wal-Mart's ability to keep the staples of life inexpensive in our society is probably the single most important factor in keeping the cost of living for the poor manageable, or the reality that it is the poor who clamor for a Wal-Mart while their moralistic economic "superiors" block construction, does not sit well with the social justice crowd they seek solidarity with. And that is what too much of this is about -- solidarity with the social justice crowd, not with the poor. It is moralistic elitism from outside and above the poor, not action and contemplation in community with the poor.