Monday's News & Ideas
Incarceration -- and inspiration
The Advocate (Baton Rouge, La.): Faith-based wing at Louisiana prison aims to get inside people kept inside, but not everyone agrees with the concept or the method.
AIG: Why the facts don't matter
Harvard Business, Dynamic Strategies blog: Faced with symbolic, emotionally charged challenges, great leaders re-frame the issues in ways that acknowledge emotions but put them in a greater context.
Seminaries and sex
Religion & Ethics Newsweekly: Are seminarians being taught what they need to know to become good counselors to their future parishioners?
Financial crunch weighing heavily on churches
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Financial crisis forcing some Pittsburgh pastors to take a second full-time job and a few churches to close.
The Spark
‘Wild Blessings’: Wendell Berry's passions, reframed
Wendell Berry, the Kentucky-based agrarian philosopher, has been described as our era's heir to Emerson and Thoreau — a writer concerned with the importance of community, and with the lessons we can learn from the natural world. Now, as NPR’s Weekend Edition reports, the Actors Theatre of Louisville is putting his ideas on stage.
Is sex divine?
There's an easy answer to Laurel Schneider's question, posed in the RNS story on what seminaries teach on sex. "Is sex divine?" "No."
I suspect the question though is what is meant by "divine." If she means "Is sex good" the easy answer is yes: it was created by God, and as with all creation it is now fallen, and on the way to being redeemed by Christ. There are faiths that treat sex (and other things that really matter: birth, death, coming of age, whatever) as "divine," but Judaism and Christianity (and Islam for that matter) are not among them.
AIG
This may be beside the point of why the link was posted, but I object to the way the AIG bonus problem is being characterized. The Columbia professor takes a significant ethical failure and treats it as a PR challenge.
Part of the problem is that Wall Street has a different understanding of the word “bonus” than normal people do. (By “normal people” I mean honest taxpayers. In fact Wall Street categorizes a portion of salary as “bonus” to help them weasel out of paying their full share of income taxes.) The public outcry is due to the perception that AIG managers are being rewarded for massive failure, a failure for which “normal people” are picking up the tab.
The argument that we have to pay AIG employees handsomely so they’ll stick around to undo the mess they made, the mess that only they can straighten out – well, now it feels like they’re not simply cheating me, they’re shaking me down.
Business schools’ reputation has taken a beating this year, and I don’t believe this essay does anything to improve that.
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