What American accent do you have?

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Northeast   Judging by how you talk you are probably from north Jersey, New York City, Connecticut or Rhode Island. Chances are, if you are from New York City (and not those other places) people would probably be able to tell if they actually heard you speak.
Philadelphia
Boston
The Inland North
North Central
The South
The West
The Midland
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Which Superhero am I?

Given a lifelong love of comic book superheroes, it was hard to resist!

+Fr Gregory

Your results:
You are Superman

Superman 95% Green Lantern 80% Spider-Man 75% The Flash 60% Batman 55% Robin 52% Supergirl 52% Hulk 50% Wonder Woman 32% Catwoman 25% Iron Man 25%

You are mild-mannered, good, strong and you love to help others.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

Leadership Burnout in the Orthodox Church (Part II)

In a previous posting (Leadership Burnout in the Orthodox Church, Part I) I discussed what I saw as three central causes of burnout among Orthodox Christian clergy and lay leadership. These are:

(1) An institutional lack of recognition of personal and professional achievement.

(2) Unhealthy limiting of personal and professional autonomy.

(3) A systemic neglect of the work of fostering justice relationships among ourselves.

While the term “burnout” is somewhat overused and admits to a variety of definitions, I think the best description of the experience is offered by Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig in his book Power in the Helping Professions. He writes about a therapist, late in his career and well respected in his profession, who nevertheless (for all his technical proficiency) has become closed to the mystery of being. For this man, all his relationships are at their foundation, professional relationship—everything he does and every conversation he has is a professional in nature.

Something very much like this can, and often does, happen to those who take on leadership roles in the Church. There is the parish council member who is busy with “council business” during Sunday Liturgy. Or, there is the man or woman on the “Welcoming Committee” or “Hospitality and Outreach Committee” who is so busy welcoming Christ in the guise of visitors that he or she neglects to welcome Him in the Scriptures or Holy Communion.

There is likewise the priest who runs from one pastoral obligation to another and yet fails to spend anytime in quiet prayer and who never seems to have time to read the Scriptures or do the studying that is essential for his own personal and pastoral development. Ironically, it is often this same man who is so busy caring for other people that he fails not only to care for his own non-negotiable physical needs for proper food, adequate rest and exercise. And the circle of failure will even extend beyond his spiritual and physical health and erode his other relationships so that he neglects his wife and children and friends.

In there own way, bishops are as prone to the same aberrations that we see among the laity and the clergy. Many (I dare say most) bishops simply neglect their own monastic profession, living less as monks and more a bachelors or (worse) princes or middle level executives. Often they view his brother clergy not as fellow workers, but (at best) as employees or worse competitors.

As I mentioned in another post, especially dangerous here is the bishop or priest or lay leader for that matter who adopts a remote style of leadership that actively works to obstruct anything that resembles a collaborative style of leadership. As Guggenbuhl-Craig work suggests this happens as a result of a narrow for vision. As the article summarizing Ramarajan and Barsade’s research puts it, burnout is most likely when we fail to see the broader context of our work.

It is important that “Employers can also highlight to their employees how important their work is to society as a whole, Barsade adds. ‘Very often, caretaking work is not all that valued, but if employees in a daycare center, for example, understand that they are involved in early childhood education,’ this puts their work in a broader context. In addition, she suggests that for people in jobs that don’t pay very well (and won’t in the future), managers can at least compliment employees, hold awards dinners and so forth, ‘just so long as these shows of respect are authentic.’” For many Orthodox Christian leaders what is missing is a healthy, more biblically and anthropologically sound broader context of ministry.

In the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese the Greek ethnic community often provides this broader context. With converts, especially in the Antiochian Archdiocese and the Orthodox Church in America, this broader context is the rejection of the “West.” In both cases however the broader context is often more imaginary then it is empirical. We too often situation the ministry of the Church with a context that is really only a sentimental longing for Byzantium or Holy Russia or the “Old Country” or (what is underneath in all) a rarefied “Eastern mindset.”

Orthodox Christians certainly cannot divorce ourselves from our own past, theological or ethnic. We have obviously come from somewhere. But, the only way to be faithful to our past is to faithful to our current situation. What we fail to do, and what we must do, is actively engage in a creative and appreciative critical dialogue with not only the culture around us, but also our own past.

At the heart of this dialogue is not a mechanical preservation of the past, but a willingness (like the wise steward) to draw from the treasury house of tradition those riches that make it possible for us to be “yeast in the dough” of the contemporary world. Our goal, in other words, is not so much preservation of the past as transformation of the present.

In answering the charge that Christians were harmful to the health of the Roman Empire, St Augustine argued that that as the soul is to the body, so the Christian is to the world. Jesus tells us that we “are the light of the world.” If we see the world around us as shrouded in darkness or trapped by the powers of sin and death, then we are called by Christ to respond by proclaiming the Gospel to the fallen world.

The burnout, the unjust practices, and the just plain sloppiness in the Church’s life reflect I think the lost of an evangelical vision for the Church’s life. We have become more concerned with preservation—cultural, theological, and liturgical—then transformation. But it is precisely working for transformation, our own and the world’s, which is at the heart of the Church’s vocation and (in a practical fashion) the way out of the narrowing of vision that afflicts us.

In neglecting the evangelical vocation of the Church we have fallen back on ourselves and brought about an increasingly narrow vision of the Church’s life. It is not, and I cannot emphasizes this enough, a narrowness of vision that cause us to neglect evangelism, but our neglect of evangelism that narrows our hearts. Or maybe more accurately, evangelism is part and parcel of how God in Jesus Christ heals our constricted heart. We learn to love by loving, we learn what is really essential in the Christian life by introducing others to Christ and taking seriously their struggles.

I know in my own life, having to respond to those who do not believe has taught me what is of primary and what is of secondary importance in the Christian life. Add to that the undeniable limitations that mission work imposes which has the delightful effect of bring about and a certain clarity of vision, often whether I want that clarity or not.

“Let us,” as we sing in the Cherubic Hymn, “lay aside all earthly cares and welcome the King of All, invisibly escorted by angelic hosts.” This is the heart of the evangelic life and it is the key to the transformation and revival of the Church.

The effectiveness of self-imposed deadlines on procrastination

This just in from our eclectic social scientific friends at Tasty Research:

I often hear of graduate students postponing their research to do other things: play Tetris, read comments on Slashdot, or write a blog. We defer doing something “more important” to do something else and feel guilty and pleased at the same time.

How sweet is it not to do work? Apparently, sweet enough to abate the heavy and bitter costs of procrastinating. Late fines and extra work for missing a deadline seem distant when you can chat online for another 20 minutes right now.

Why do people procrastinate? This is an effect psychologists attribute to “hyperbolic time discounting”: the immediate rewards are disproportionally more compelling than the greater delayed costs. In other words, Procrastination itself is the reward.

However, the eventual cost of neglecting a task has such an impact on people that they learn to impose deadlines on themselves to restrict their own behavior. At what lengths do people do this? This article looks at three questions:

1. Do people self-impose costly deadlines on tasks in which procrastination may impede performance?
2. Are self-imposed deadlines effective in improving task performance?
3. Do people set their deadlines optimally, for maximum performance enhancement?

A few studies are reported in this paper, where students had the opportunity to choose their own deadlines for three tasks they needed to do (write or proofread papers). They were allowed to set separate deadlines for each paper, but they would be binded to the deadlines and be assessed penalties if the papers were submitted late. Logically, the best solution would be to set all the deadlines to be the last day, which would give them the most flexibility and time to work on the three tasks.

However, only 27% of the students chose to submit all three papers on the last day of class. This answers the first question — people are aware of their own procrastination and give themselves earlier deadlines to counter it. The studies show that these deadlines do improve performance over only having deadlines at the very end. Unfortunately, they are still suboptimal because the subjects who were given equally spaced deadlines performed better, thus supporting question two but rejecting question three.

But hey, I’ll push myself to start my taxes earlier, but after a round or two of Winterbells.

Ariely, D. & Wertenbroch, K. Procrastination, deadlines, and performance: Self-control by precommitment. Psychological Science, 13(3), 219-224. [PDF]

Two Creativity Killers

From churchrelevance.com:

Seth Godin states that there are two things that kill marketing creativity.

1. Fear
2. Lack of Imagination

Fear is nothing more than hyped-up worry. So stop worrying about failure or criticism and start focusing on the things of God and what He wants you to do as Matthew 6:25-34 teaches. Of course, there will be times when things do not work or go as planned, but learn from your mistakes. It will only strengthen your creativity.

Lack of imagination is simply poor stewardship of the brain God gave you. Learn to imagine like you did like as a child. Most importantly, don’t instantly kill the ideas you imagine because you think they are impossible. It could be you just don’t know yet how to make it possible or entertaining the idea could be the link and inspiration you need for an even better idea.

So stop fearing and start imagining, and you will find yourself reaching a new level of creativity.

But What’s The Reason For Jesus?

At this time of year the “Christmas Wars” are again being fought.

People–that is Christians–will say that we must put “Christ back in Christmas! No more X-mas!” But my personal favorite remains the bold proclamation: “Jesus is the Reason for the Season!”

But what is the reason for Jesus?

The man in black, Johnny Cash, in his video God’s Gonna Cut You Down offers us a sober reminder of the reason for Jesus and His birth. Jesus has come to save us from our sinfulness and to spare us the harsh judgment that Cash sing about in his song.

This is not to say that God will not cut us down–but it does mean that in Christ the cutting is therapeutic, a pruning away of our sinfulness rather than a cutting that is a casting away.

So yes, God in Jesus is “gonna cut you down” but from the cross of your own making. And 33 years from His birth, this new born child will ascend the cross in your place.

(A thoughtful reflection on Cash’s video is offered by Russell Moore on Mere Comments. You can read Moore’s essay here: “Cash Refund.”)

Leadership Burnout in the Orthodox Church (Part I)

As the glorious disciples, in the washing of the feet, were enlightened, the profane Judas, ravaged by greed, as benighted. And to the lawless judges he surrenders You the just judge. Consider, you who love money, the one who hanged himself for the sake of it. Shun the insatiate heart that could dare such a deed against the Teacher. Lord, benevolent above all humans, glory to You.

Apolytikion, Holy Thursday

Back in November, a summary appeared of a research project undertaken at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. The study conducted by Lakshmi Ramarajan (a doctoral student in the Wharton’s management department) and Sigal Barsade (management professor at Wharton) is titled “What Makes the Job Tough? The Influence of Organizational Respect of Burnout in Human Services.” The summary of the research can be found online in an article entitled “More than Job Demands or Personality, Lack of Organizational Respect Fuels Employee Burnout.” While the whole article and the study it references are both worth reading, there are two points that I think are important for understanding the practical challenges of fostering a healthy style of leadership in the Orthodox Church: (1) the importance of mutual respect in the Church’s life and (2) the need for a vision for Church life that transcends the parish. In this essay I will address the first of these points

Based on their research “on the health care industry—specifically on certified nursing assistants (CNAs) in a large, long-term care facility,” Professor Barsade argues that “One of the biggest complaints employees have is they are not sufficiently recognized by their organizations for the work that they do. Respect is a component of recognition. When employees don’t feel that the organization respects and values them, they tend to experience higher levels of burnout.”

After discussing different aspects of institutional respect, the authors identify the autonomy of the employee as key to job satisfaction for both professional and hourly workers. The conclusion that Ramarajan and Barsade reach is that “The impact of organizational respect on burnout is felt most strongly when job autonomy is low. This finding confirms the researchers’ hypothesis going into the study about the importance of autonomy, which they define as ‘the discretion that one has to determine the processes and schedules involved in completing a task.’ Autonomy, the researchers note, can act as a buffer on stress—and actually decrease job burnout—if autonomy is high, but not if it is low.”

In a recent essay posted on OrthodoxyToday.com (“Understanding Clergy Stress: A Psychospiritual Response”) priest-psychologist Fr. George Morelli describes for us a pastoral situation that suggests that clergy leaders at least have relatively little autonomy in their professional life. Clergy find themselves responsible canonically to their bishops and economically to their parishes. Even assuming that they are not trapped between conflicting episcopal and lay demands or that there is not a collusion between episcopal and lay that works against the priest’s best interest, the priest serving “two masters” has the practical effect of limiting the areas of his autonomy not only professionally but also personally.

Ironically, this limiting of personal and professional autonomy is not limited to the parish priest. Rather it reflects an overall unhealthy relational structure in the Church. For better or worse, each order of the Church tends to find its own legitimate freedom either inappropriately limited or (what amounts to the same thing) neglected by one, and some times both, of the other orders. In other words, the life situation of the parish priest that Fr. George is not unique to the priest. Rather each order in the Church will find itself at times in an adversarial relation with one or both of the other two.

Largely I think this lack of institutional respect reflects a lack of appreciation for justice in the Church. Justice in the Church is not primarily procedural but relational. We do not see that our own personal good is only possible to the degree that we place the good of the other—spiritual, material, professional and personal—before our own. Even if relationships are not adversarial, this lack of concern for the wellness of others reflects poorly on the Church’s commitment to justice and I would suggest undermines the abilitu of episcopal, clerical and lay leadership to function effectively.

We have as Orthodox Christians neglected the work of justice among ourselves, I would suggest, because we have embraced a view of ecclesiastical relations that value above all the absence of conflict. Wrongly we equated the absence of conflict with peace we pray for in the Great Litany.

But this peace that we pray for, and upon which the life of the Church depends, is shalom. The peace that we need is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of right relationship among ourselves and with the world around us. And peace in this sense is the fruit of justice. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu said in his 1984 Nobel Prize lecture: “God’s Shalom, peace, involves inevitably righteousness, justice, wholeness, fullness of life, participation in decision-making, goodness, laughter, joy, compassion, sharing and reconciliation.”

At the top of these essay is an icon of Christ washing the feet of His disciples. The hymn for Holy Thursday suggest that either we serve one another in fidelity to the example of Christ or, like Judas, we will be “ravaged by greed,” betray Christ and destroy ourselves.

In my next essay, I will again return to the study by Ramarajan and Barsade to suggest what might be done to correct the current situation in the Orthodox Church.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

History of Religion in 90 seconds!

I thought this was clever and worth posting.

On Prophets and Quislings

David Mills discusses the sociology of academic writing in his post on Mere Comments this morning. One of the points he makes is that academic writing is writing by academics for academics. The practical result of this is that academic writing has relatively little to do with the advancement of truth. This is especially the case in the humanities and so theology.

This raises for me an interesting question for Orthodox/Catholic ecumenical relations. The vast majority of our clergy and theologians are trained in an academic setting by academics who have themselves adapted to the ethos of the modern research university.

In other words, we form intellectually and spiritually the people who will be the teachers and guardians of our respective traditions in an environment that often does not value clarity much less the truth. Quoting approvingly C. Wright Mills’ book The Sociological Imagination, David Mills explains why this sad state of affairs has come to pass in the university: “Desire for status is one reason why academic men slip so readily into unintelligibility.”

Unintelligibility in the service of status (and not infrequently, power and control) is not a norm that I find suitable for the next generation of priests, deacons and theologians. Sadly though, this is exactly the social norm of the university and by extension the seminary whose faculties have often drank deeply of the academic ethos.

David Mills offers me much food for thought as I reflect on the need for East & West to re-establish full communion with one another. The proclamation of the Gospel in general, and reconciliation of divided Christians in particular, is an act of prophetic boldness that demands moral and physical courage. But the academy does not value this courage, but rather ambiguity, vainglory, pride, and pettiness in expression and ambition. It is it seems to me an environment better suited for forming quislings then leaders.

To read the whole of David Mills’s reflections: C. Wright Mills on why academics write the way they do

More Thoughts on Orthodox-Roman Relations (IV)

The latest installment of the essay on Orthodox/Catholic relations by Archbishop Anthony (Bashir):

By Anthony Bashir, Archbishop-Metropolitan, Syrian Archdiocese of North America

From Orthodoxy* (10:4, Autumn 1964)

Let me review [Patriarch Maximos'] conclusions. Christ is, he says, the only head of the Church. The Pope, a successor of St Peter, is head of the episcopal college. The Pope as the head of the bishops governs them but is not distinct from them. The bishops are the true heads of their dioceses. The Orthodox Church is the result of a living apostolic tradition in which Rome intervenes only by way of exception. The primatial power of the Pope is personal and pastoral. It cannot be delegated, and is only to be understood in the light of the Pope’s position as head of the episcopal college. The Patriarch assumes that these conclusions are possible even after the First Vatican Council of 1870 in which it was solemnly proclaimed that the Pope is infallible in himself, and without the consensus of the Church. If Patriarch Maximos is correct, then we Orthodox may hope that the First Vatican Council did not shut the door forever on a reconciliation with the Latin Church.

Read more: Thoughts on Orthodox-Roman Relations (IV)