Category: Leading and Helping When People Want to Stay Stuck

How can we use our limited resources to make the biggest impact in the world?

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How to Live the Christian Faith Outside the Church: A Review of Cristóbal Krusen’s They Were Christians

When Cristóbal Krusen became a Christian, he thought he needed to become a Pastor to be a real Christian. As he tried to live his Christian faith outside of the work of the church, it made him wonder how other Christians had done it. How has Christianity affected those who believed it? Did it make an impact? He thought it must have because “[i]n truth, if God exists, then one should expect to find those who love him in every field of human endeavor” (This and all citations hereafter are from his book They Were Christians, 12). His book They Were Christians is the result of his search to find examples of people who put their Christian faith into action in the world. People like Florence Nightingale, John D. Rockefeller, and Frederick Douglas made a big impact on the world, and their story is well-known. However, Krusen wanted to tell the rest of the story. These people were Christians, and this made a big impact on what they did and why. That is less well-known.

I am a Pastor. I work for the institutional church. However, the majority of people in my congregation do not. One of my jobs is to help them think through how they can take the faith they hear about on Sunday and apply it to their lives. I can give them principles, but I have realized through the years that I also need examples and stories. So, I began to look at collections of Christian biographies. Most of the people in the collections were Pastors. Their examples were helpful but what about Christians who didn’t become pastors? That’s what I needed to inspire my people to live out their faith outside the church. When I saw Krusen’s book, I was intrigued. But I still wondered how much it would really help. Continue reading “How to Live the Christian Faith Outside the Church: A Review of Cristóbal Krusen’s They Were Christians“

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9 Powerful Quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Our nation was formed with the idea that all people were created equal. However, from its inception, there was a glaring contradiction to that principle in the enslavement of African-Americans. We fought a war to bring an end to this contradiction, but even after the war, justice and equality were denied to African-Americans throughout the nation and particularly in the South. For prosperous Americans, it was too easy to ignore this injustice. Thanks be to God that He raised up Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others to compel this nation to pay attention to this injustice and seek to right it. Here are 9 quotes from Dr. King that powerfully describe the conditions African-Americans faced, the method he would use to confront those conditions, and the vision of new conditions that he wanted to bring about.

All of these quotes are taken from The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. compiled and edited by Clayborne Carson. I highly recommend it.

The Problem

1. “My mother confronted the age-old problem of the Negro parent in America: how to explain discrimination and segregation to a small child. She taught me that I should feel a sense of ‘somebodiness’ but that on the other hand I had to go out and face a system that stared me in the face every day saying you are ‘less than,’ you are ‘not equal to'” (3).

2. “A man who lived under the torment of knowledge of the rape of his grandmother and murder of his father under the conditions of the present social order, does not readily accept that social order or seek to integrate into it” (268).

3. “The throbbing pain of segregation could be felt but not seen. It scarred Negroes in every experience of their lives. . . . This Freedom Ride movement came into being to reveal the indiginities and the injustices which Negro people faced as they attempted to do the simple thing of traveling through the South as interstate passengers” (153).

The Method

4. “The way of acquiescence leads to moral and spiritual suicide. The way of violence leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. But the way of nonviolence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community” (134). Continue reading “9 Powerful Quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.”

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What Would Our Society Do with Peace and Prosperity?

If we had basic provision, leisure time, and peace, what would our society do with it? What should society do with it?

Most of our time and energy is consumed with making sure that we will have enough provision, food, clothes, housing, security, savings. This is true on an individual level, and this is true on a societal level. If we do not feel we have enough, we want to figure out how we can have enough. If we do have enough, we worry about threats that would keep us from having enough.

But what if we didn’t have to worry about that, either on a societal level or an individual level? What would we do with our lives? What is the purpose of human life beyond merely staying alive and well-fed?

That’s the question that Aristotle considers in his books on ethics and politics. He believed that the question of politics was a question of what form of state would allow the most people to realize the ideal form of life (Politics, 2.1). For, as he said, “a state exists for the sake of a good life, and not for the sake of life only . . .” (3.9). His answer was that the best form of government was one “in which every man, whoever he is, can act best and live happily” (7.2). So, politics should ask not only what is the way for people to have enough, to have mere life, but, how can they live well, how can they live the best life, and how can they live a happy life. Continue reading “What Would Our Society Do with Peace and Prosperity?”

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Aristotle’s Politics: The Politics of the Golden Mean

Aristotle’s Nichomachaean Ethics is famous for its idea of the Golden Mean. Aristotle writes, “It is the nature of such things to be destroyed by defect and excess . . .” (2.2). Consequently, he argues that excellence is “a state concerned with a choice, lying in a mean relative to us” (2.6). It is important to note that not every characteristic could be understood this way. For example, “spite, shamelessness, envy” all are bad in themselves (ibid.). He also understood that it was not always easy to determine the mean. For example, in regards to giving and spending money, “to do this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right aim, and in the right way, that is not for everyone, nor is it easy . . .” (2.9). All that said, Aristotle believed that the Golden Mean was an important way to understand what an excellent or virtuous individual would look like.

After reading carefully through Aristotle’s Politics, his politics seem to me to be a politics of the Golden Mean. Aristotle quotes Phocylides: “Many things are best in the mean; I desire to be of a middle condition in my city” (4.11). The Golden Mean, according to Aristotle, could help us understand what the excellent or virtuous state would look like. In fact, this concept may be more useful in politics than in individual ethics. Here I will demonstrate this briefly from Aristotle’s Politics, applying it to a variety of political issues along the way.

The basic question Aristotle sets forth for himself in Politics is this: “Our purpose is to consider what form of political community is best of all for those who are most able to realize their ideal of life” (2.1). In other words, what is the best possible state?

Aristotle begins his discussion in the abstract. However, he recognizes that the ideal is not likely to be possible. So, he says, we ought to

inquire what is the best constitution for most states, and the best life for most men, neither assuming a standard of excellence which is above ordinary persons, nor an education which is exceptionally favoured by nature and circumstances, nor yet an ideal state which is an aspiration only, but having regard to the life in which the majority are able to share, and to the form of government which states in general can attain (4.11).

Aristotle wants us to consider what is really going to work best for most people. This is important to ask because “political writers, although they have excellent ideas, are often unpractical” (4.1). Continue reading “Aristotle’s Politics: The Politics of the Golden Mean”

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