Category: Meanderings

Playing Through

Toward the end of her essay The Human-Not-Quite-Human Sayers gives an interesting view of Jesus (and a quite harsh view of the Church).  This is where I would like to start the discussion. God, of course, may have his own opinion, but the Church is reluctant to endorse it. I think that I have never heard a sermon preached on the story of Martha and Mary that did not attempt, somehow, somewhere, to explain away its text. Mary’s of course was the better part – the Lord said so and we must not precisely contradict Him. But we will be careful not to despise Martha. No doubt He approved of her too. We could not get on without her, and indeed (having paid lip-service to God’s opinion) we must admit that we greatly prefer her. For Martha was doing a really feminine job, whereas Mary was just behaving like any other disciple, male or female; and that is a hard pill to swallow. Perhaps it is no wonder that women were the first at the Cradle and the last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man – there never has been another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronized; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them as “The women, God help us!” or “The ladies, God bless them!”; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unself-conscious. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words or deeds of Jesus that there was anything “funny” about woman’s nature. But we might easily deduce it from his contemporaries, and from His prophets before Him, and from His Church to this day. Women are not human; nobody shall persuade that they are human; let them say what they like, we will not believe it, though One rose from the dead. (p. 46-47 from 1981 printing)

Dorothy Sayers on whether or not women are human (they are!) … read more at Jesus Creed.

The single best way churches can help build strong marriages is to help people select the right person to marry. Neil Warren has noted, based on extensive research, that the choice of who you will marry will have a bigger impact on your marriage than all the work you do on it after you get married! His book, Finding the Love of your Life, remains the single best resource I know for people thinking about marrrying. Some critical steps to help people think through: –Get healthy before you get married –Don’t get married too young –Don’t get married too soon –Every similarity is like money in the bank. (This is so true that even couples who differ more than 15 IQ points are more likely to get divorced than IQ-compatible couples!)

John Ortberg on the how the church can help marriages not end in divorce.

Cable news thinking has nothing to do with fires or with politics. Instead, it amplifies the worst elements of emotional reaction: Focus on the urgent instead of the important. Vivid emotions and the visuals that go with them as a selector for what’s important. Emphasis on noise over thoughtful analysis. Unwillingness to reverse course and change one’s mind. Xenophobic and jingoistic reactions (fear of outsiders). Defense of the status quo encouraged by an audience self-selected to be uniform. Things become important merely because others have decided they are important. Top down messaging encourages an echo chamber (agree with this edict or change the channel). Ill-informed about history and this particular issue. Confusing opinion with the truth. Revising facts to fit a point of view. Unwillingness to review past mistakes in light of history and use those to do better next time. If I wanted to hobble an organization or even a country, I’d wish these twelve traits on them. I wonder if this sounds like the last board meeting you went to…

Seth Godin: the problem with cable news thinking is that it has crept into our corporate meetings.

The book starts with a story of a college exam for which students had more-than-adequate time to prepare. Nonetheless, there was moaning of the highest (lowest?) order as students got to the last question. Which was … “What is the first name of the man who cleans our school?” Damn few, or fewer than few, aced that one. The prof explained, “As you go forward in life, you will meet many people. All of them are important. No matter what their position, everyone you cross paths with deserves your attention and respect, even if all you do is just smile and say hello.”

Tom Peters plugs Deborah Norville’s The Power of Respect … the opening story challenges us all.

I was traveling with the CEO and several other vice presidents from our company. We were discussing how the expertise and culture at our company had not evolved over the past decade and what a terrible challenge that represented for our leadership team. Our CEO offered, “Someone who repeats the same year of their life fifteen times doesn’t have 15 years of experience; they have one year of experience repeated fifteen times.” That thought really stuck with me. We had a lot of people that fit that bill. What are leaders facing? Many people in today’s economy have pigeon-holed themselves by what they haven’t done during their careers: evolve and grow. Many of these pigeon-holed people stayed in the same industry, primarily in the same job and feel entitled to that job for the contribution they’ve made over the years.

How much experience do you have? Are you evolving and growing, or repeating what you have always done?

In Arkansas and Oklahoma, men and women marry young — half of first-time brides in these states were age 24 or younger on their wedding day. These states also have above-average shares of women who divorced in 2007-2008.1 It’s the opposite state of affairs in Massachusetts and New York. Their residents marry late — half of ever-married New York men were older than age 30 when they first wed. These states also have below-average shares of men and women who divorced in 2007-2008. Remember the classic country song: “All My Exs Live in Texas”? Well, George Strait was on to something. Looking at numbers, Texas is indeed home to more thrice-married adults than any other state, about 428,000 women and 373,000 men. But that’s partly because it’s home to so many people, period. Looking at rates, about 6% of Texans who ever have been married have wed three times or more. That is similar to the national average (5%), but well below the leaders in this category — the neighboring states of Arkansas and Oklahoma — where about 10% of all ever-married adults have had at least three spouses. Meantime, back in New York and Massachusetts, just 2% of ever-married adults have been married at least three times, placing them at the bottom on this measure among the 50 states. These findings are drawn from the recently released 2008 American Community Survey, which offers the most detailed portrait yet from the U.S. Census Bureau of marriage and divorce statistics at the state level. This is the first time the survey has included estimates of marriage and divorces within the previous 12 months, duration of marriages and Americans married multiple times.

Pew Research posts about the states of marriage and divorce in the USA. Chances are you Exs live in AR & OK, not Texas.

BRONSON & MERRYMAN: You mention Yale Dean Peter Salovey is your friend and co-worker. During a 2008 speech to the American Psychological Association, Salovey condemned your work as a series of “outrageous claims.” For example, you wrote: “… what data exist suggests it [EI] can be as powerful, and at times more powerful, than IQ.” However, Salovey charges that, when you wrote that, in 1995, there was actually no data at all, to support your position. Similarly, in American Psychologist, Salovey and colleagues wrote: “Journalistic accounts of EI raised unrealistic ideas such as that ‘90% of the difference’ between star performers and other workers is attributable to ‘emotional intelligence factors’ (Goleman, p. 1998a, p. 94) … [these] claims that we have repeatedly pointed out are misleading and unsupported by research.” Particularly in light of your friendship with Salovey, please tell us how you feel about his assessment. Why isn’t your research persuasive for Salovey? GOLEMAN: To create a new field of inquiry in any science, you have to start by connecting dots from previous work in related fields. That’s what I did in my 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence (as well as my newest, Ecological Intelligence.) I was building on the 200 or so scholarly studies cited in the book, as well as ten years of reporting on the field for the New York Times. When Peter Salovey refers to the lack of data from measures of emotional intelligence at the time I wrote, he’s right – there were few studies of emotional intelligence per se, and only the beginnings of a scale to measure the construct itself. I was arguing for the existence and utility of the construct based on a large amount of converging data from related research (just as Peter Salovey and John Mayer did in their first article on the subject in 1990). When Peter cites my 1998 book as a source of confusion, he’s referring to the point I made in my earlier blog – that the data from competence studies inadvertently created confusion, which rippled through the popular media. More important, there is so much good research on emotional intelligence since 1995 that Peter Salovey summarized it in a chapter in the Annual Review of Psychology. Both Peter and John Mayer have told me that if I hadn’t written my book there would not have been the large wave of research on the topic that is going on today.

Daniel Goleman discusses emotional intelligence with Bronson & Merryman @ NurtureShock.