To Listen and To Care

Duehrer : Knight

Great coverage of the Twittering of the Iran election protests at the Daily Dish.

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Leading for the Common Good Elizabeth O'Connor The difficulty confronting the churches in the organization of a small group movement is the lack of leadership for such groups. Most of us lack the confidence required to assume this kind of responsibility. We have discovered over the years that even the people who know how to administer churches, banks, corporations and hospitals have no idea how to nurture a small group so that its members deepen their lives in Christ---learn self-knowledge, how to listen and to care---the deep nurture of the spiritual life so essential for the recovery of vision and passion. The lack of servant leaders is being experienced in the whole of society. One looks in vain today for those who are using their strengths and gifts and riches on behalf of the common good. In all of our institutions is a yearning for the presence of the fearless ones in whose company we will be able to put aside our own fears and begin to hope and exercise imagination. Source: Servant Leaders, Servant Structures Add your thoughts at inward/outward *

Not yet up on the web...
July HARPERS
"Barack Hoover Obama" by Kevin Baker

"Every instinct the president has honed, every voice he hears in Washington, every inclination of our political culture urges incrementalism, urges deliberation, if any significant change is to be brought about. the trouble is that we are at one of those rare moments in history when the radical becomes pragmatic, when deliberation and compromise foster disaster. The question is not what can be done but what must be done."

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"The story of the real Herbert Hoover reads like something out of an Indiana Jones script, with touches of Dickens and the memoirs of Albert Schweitzer. Orphaned and penniless by the age of nine, Hoover was raised by an exploitative uncle who considered him more chattel than son. He had no illusions about the America he grew up in, writing years later, "As gentle as are the memories of the times, I am not recommending a return to the good old days. Sadness was greater, and death came sooner.

Removed from public school at fourteen to work as his uncle's office boy, Hoover nonetheless learned enough at night school to make the very first class at the newly opened Stanford University, where he studied geology and engineering. He paid his own way by working as a waiter, a typist, and a handyman, and eventually running a laundry service, a baggage service, and a newspaper route. (Unsurprisingly, his favorite book was David Copperfield.) After graduation, he ran mining camps and scouted new strikes around the globe. It was an adventurous life; on one occasion he made a small fortune by following an ancient Chinese map and tiger tracks into a moribund silver mine in Burma. By the time he was forty, Hoover was worth $84 million in today's dollars, and he retired from business to take up public life. "The ideal of service,' he would later write, was no burden on the striving entrepreneur but a "great spiritual force poured out by our people as never before in the history of the world."

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Why was Herbert Hoover so reluctant to make the radical changes that were so clearly needed? I could not have been a question of competence or compassion for this lifelong Quaker, who had rushed sustenance to starving people around the world regardless of their nationalities or beliefs. Ultimately, Hoover could not break with the prevailing beliefs of his day. The essence of the Progressive Era in which he had come of age -- the very essence of his own public image -- was that government was a science. .....

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Progressivism aspired to be something of a political science itself, untrammeled by ideological or partisan influence: there was a right way and a wrong way to do things, and all unselfish and uncorrupted individuals could be counted on to do the right thing, once they were shown what that was.

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Farsighted as he was compared with almost everyone else in public life, believing as much as he did in activist government, he still could not convince himself to take the next step and accept that the basic economic tenents he had believed in all his life were discredited; that something wholly new was required.

Such a transformation would have required a mental suppleness that was simply not in the makeup of this fabulously successful scientist and self-made businessman. And it was this inability to radically alter his thinking that, ultimately, distinguished Hoover from Franklin Roosevelt. FDR was by no means the rigorous thinker that Hoover was, and many observers then and since have accused him of having no fixed principles whatsoever. And yet it was Roosevelt, the Great Improviser, who was able to patch and borrow and fudge his way to solutions not only to the Depression but also to sustained prosperity and democracy.

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Much like Herbert Hoover, Barack Obama is a man attemptivng to realize a stirring new vision of his society without cutting himself free from the dogmas of the past -- without accepting the inevitable conflict. Like Hoover, he is bound to fail.

President Obama, to be fair, seems to be even more alone than Hoover was in facing the emergency at hand. The most appalling aspect of the present crisis has been the utter fecklessness of the American elite in failing to confront it. From both the private and public sectors, across the entire political spectrum, the lack of both will and new ideas has been stunning.

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More frustrating has been the torpor among Obama's fellow Democrats...

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We have seen a parade of aged satraps from vast, windy places stepping forward to tell us what is off the table.

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These are men with tiny constituencies who sat for decades in the Senate without doing or saying anything of note, who acquiesced shamelessly to the worst abuses of the Bush Administration and who come forward now to chide the president for not concentrating enough on reducing the budget deficit, or for "trying to do too much," as if he were as old and as indolent as they are. "

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Buy the magazine , read the entire article. Quite thought provoking, if not a big cheerer-upper......
The observations made about the need to change one's thinking and improvise is an interesting way to think about servant leadership. What does the situation or the institution or the individual require right now ? "How to listen and to care" indeed ! It's so hard to get out from the under the weight of the 'conventional wisdom' about what is going on. Those with the self-knowledge and humility are not usually the ones with the ambition and drive to rise in politics.