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Fall 2005: Reading Recommendations
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"What shall I read?"
Wondering what books would most inspire and inform you—and other leaders—as you and your congregation engage in new opportunities to learn, grow, and serve? Congregational Resource Guide staff ask you to consider these top pics. (Click on the book’s title to access the publisher’s or retailer’s Web site.)
We at the Alban Institute and the Indianapolis Center for Congregations wish you and yours a vital and transformational season .
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Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together
William Isaacs, Author. New York, NY: Random House, 1999.
Have you experienced a meeting or discussion where you could predict the outcome? Where you felt you didn’t have a voice or where you knew the agenda would be hijacked? Have you ever wished you could get past politeness or debate and really think together? In Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together, William Isaacs provides a conceptual framework to get to the heart of conversation. Presenting practical examples, Isaacs integrates the theory and practice of dialogue in a way that stimulates creativity. By thinking together, individuals and organizations are able to address the challenges they face and create a better future.
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The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (New Revised Edition)
Jonathan Sacks, Author. New York, NY: Continuum Books, 2003.
In the midst of well-publicized calls for nations to take a "first-strike" approach in the conflict between civilizations, Jonathan Sacks (Chief Rabbi, the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth) pleas for "tolerance in an age of extremism." At its heart, this book analyzes of the impact of globalization. In six chapters, Sacks examines six moral dimensions for guiding globalization processes: control, contribution, compassion, creativity, co-operation, conservation, and conciliation. These six principles, described as "compass bearings," allow us to judge whether we are moving in the right direction. They also can lead us to covenantal relationships, based on hope and on the inclusion of sound moral principles.
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Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
David Allen, Author. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2001.
David Allen explains how you can be more productive and less stressed by following his organizational system. The key is to first gather the incomplete "stuff" of your life into a huge in-basket. Then, determine what each item is and if it requires some action. If not: trash it, put it in a tickler folder, or file it for later reference. If so: ask yourself what the next action is. Does that "next action" take two minutes or less? If the answer is "yes," do it now. If the answer is "no," either delegate it or defer it. This system also allows for projects involving large-scale planning.
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God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights
Charles Marsh, Author. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Charles March (professor of religious studies, University of Virginia) explores how religious and theological perspectives shaped both the movement for, and the movement against, civil rights in the 1960s. He takes readers inside the lives of those for whom theology was central to the struggle for rights—activist Fannie Lou Hamer, Methodist minister Ed King, and SNCC member Cleveland Sellars. He also gives a close-up view of two people who used religion to justify racism—KKK Wizard Sam Bowers and white Baptist pastor William Douglas Hudgins. Through their stories, the reader discovers a political and social landscape infused with spiritual energies and ideals.
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The Good Priest's Son: A Novel
Reynolds Price, Author. New York, NY: Scribner, 2005.
Here is a poignant story of hope and despair from one of the South's most poetic and prolific writers. Reynolds Price weaves the tale of Mabry Kincaid, a New York art conservator who is flying home from Europe on September 11, 2001 when his plane is diverted to Nova Scotia after the terrorist attacks. Now that Mabry's apartment is uninhabitable, he travels to his native North Carolina for a visit with his ailing and elderly father, Episcopal priest Tasker Kincaid. During Mabry's stay, he encounters a number of characters who remind him of both the sins in his past and the possibilities for redemption and reconciliation.
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The Leadership Labyrinth: Negotiating the Paradoxes of Ministry
Judson Edwards, Author. Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys Publishers, 2005.
Drawing on years of pastoral experience, Judson Edwards explains 21 paradoxes of ministerial life. He devotes a short chapter to each paradox. Some paradoxes focus on our connections with other people; others focus on the problems of ministry; still others focus on the conundrums of our own lives. Leaders in both lay and ordained ministries will find this book illuminating. It sheds light on those truths that we often recognize only after years of struggling to convince ourselves that life is different. If we can realize such truths earlier rather than later, ministry might be more satisfying—and perhaps more fun.
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Lizzie's War: A Novel
Tim Farrington, Author. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005.
This is the story of Elizabeth O'Reilly, the pregnant wife of a career Marine Corps officer and mother of four children. Having seen her husband off to Vietnam, she is left to reconcile the realities of motherhood with her longing to pick up the theater career she once abandoned. Lizzie's War intertwines the social history of 1960s America with the personal histories of the O'Reilly family. A modern epic, it portrays the ravages of war, the dark humor of a soldier navigating life in the trenches, the clash of a mother's everyday duties with her unspoken desires, and the perennial conflict between God and humanity.
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Offerings of the Heart: Money and Values in Faith Communities
Rabbi Shawn Israel Zevit, Author. Herndon, VA: The Alban Institute, 2005.
While congregational boards spend much time discussing finances, and biblical teachings frequently focus on money, rare is the faith community that thoughtfully connects these two realities. Offerings of the Heart aims to make such a connection. Rabbi Shawn Zevit states that his two goals here are (1) to help us examine our attitudes and behaviors around money; and (2) to provide texts and tools for any faith community seeking financial resources to "build and maintain whole lives." Offering wisdom from ancient and contemporary Jewish texts, Zevit provides a reflective approach to a topic with which many congregations grapple, but about which few people want to talk.
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The Search to Belong: Rethinking Intimacy, Community, and Small Groups
Joseph R. Myers, Author. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing, 2003.
Joseph Myers challenges the notions that (1) small groups are the only way to build community in the church, and (2) authentic community requires the kind of personal or intimate space that small groups foster. To support these challenges, he draws upon communication theorist Edward Hall's typology of the spaces in which we interact: public (participating in a common experience); social (creating neighborly interaction); personal (sharing thoughts and feelings); and intimate (revealing one's emotional nakedness). Each space—not only the personal and intimate—provides opportunities for "loving our neighbors as ourselves." Myers reminds us that Jesus ministered in all four "spaces," and encourages us to do the same.
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Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities
Adam Kahane, Author. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2004.
International mediation consultant Adam Kahane uses narrative biography to describe the challenges and opportunities involved in facing the toughest, most conflict-ridden problems—the kind that are either never solved or "solved" only by force. The author demonstrates ways of transcending superficial politeness on the one hand, and routine defensiveness on the other, to arrive at a model of talking and listening that is "open-minded, open-hearted, and open-willed." From this model, possibilities for creative ideas and innovative solutions may emerge. Even those institutions (such as congregations) that are not facing potentially violent conflicts can benefit from Kahane's wisdom on resolving difficult problems with grace.
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Stalking the Divine
Kristin Ohlson, Author. New York, NY: Plume Books, 2004.
One Christmas morning, journalist Kristin Ohlson decided to attend Mass at an inner-city Cleveland church. Once there, she was moved by the traditions of her childhood, and her curiosity was captured by a group of nuns cloistered in a monastery at the back of the church. Ohlson discovered that they were part of a religious order, the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration. Arising from three years of dialogue with the Poor Clares, Stalking the Divine explores what it is to devote one's life to God. It also reveals the author's own quest to discover whether reconnecting with her religious faith can help fill the emptiness in her life.
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The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
Thomas L. Friedman, Author. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005.
Thomas Friedman argues that in our century the world is being "flattened." Referring to a technological and commercial phenomenon, Friedman asserts that "it is now possible for more people than ever to collaborate and compete in real time with more other people on more different kinds of work from more different corners of the planet and on a more equal footing than at any previous time in the history of the world." In this book, the author explores the potentialities for innovation that can arise from globally inter-connected knowledge bases, as well as the more frightening prospects for terrorism that can arise from angry, frustrated, but Web-savvy "cells."
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