Building Trust is All-encompassing
In Trusted Partners: How Companies Build Mutual Trust and Win Together, Jordan D. Lewis writes: Trust is at the heart of today’s knowledge economy. With trust as a foundation, companies or groups within companies can share their know-how to achieve results that exceed the sum of the parts. Unlike formal contracts or rigid hierarchies, trust […]
Giovanni Boccaccio’s Human Comedy
Judith Powers Serafini-Sauli writes in Giovanni Boccaccio, Twayne’s world Authors Series, Boccaccio’s works embrace medieval and classical literature, prose and poetry, epic and lyric, Latin and Italian, popular and “high” culture. He revived the pastoral romance, attempted a modern epic, established the vernacular ottava as the epic stanza in Italian, and then, later in life, […]
Individuals are Not Stable Things
Richard Dawkins writes in The Selfish Gene, Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march […]
Bertrand Russell’s Critique of Religion: Is Religion Based on Fear?
British philosopher, mathematician, and social activist Bertrand Russell delivered his famous 1927 lecture “Why I am not a Christian” to the South London branch of the National Secular Society. Russell articulated his assertion that religion is based on fear, and that fear propagates cruelty with distinguishing precision: Religion is based primarily and mainly upon fear. […]
Meeting Difficulties
Jack Kornfield writes in A Path With Heart, A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life, Pick a situation of difficulty or conflict with others. Reflect on your last encounters and on the motivation from which you operated. How did this work? Now imagine you can bring the highest possible intentions to your […]
Mindfulness in Negotiation Conflict Management
Diane Musho Hamilton writes in Transforming Conflict: Learning how to negotiate conflict demands that we become more present, more fearless. We may need to relinquish the hopeful image of ourselves as remaining serene under all circumstances, like sitting buddhas carved from wood or stone… Whether the results are invigorating or devitalizing depends on how consciously […]
Being Driven
Tara Brach writes in Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha, We are uncomfortable because everything in our life keeps changing—our moods, our bodies, our work, the people we love, the world we live in. We can’t hold on to anything—a beautiful sunset, a sweet taste, an intimate moment with a […]
Resolving Everyday Conflict
In Work with Me!: Resolving Everyday Conflict in Your Organization, Gini Graham Scott writes: Difficult situations, which include conflicts, come up naturally and inevitably in every workplace. They happen because people have different interests, goals, priorities; because resources are limited; or because there are communication problems, power struggles, mistaken perceptions, faulty assumptions, and personality clashes. […]
Jiddu Krishnamurti Explains Religious Tolerance
Philosopher, speaker and writer Jiddu Krishnamurti explains religious tolerance: You have your beliefs, and another has his; you hold to your particular form of religion and another to his; you are a Christian, another is a Mahomedan, and yet another a Hindu. You have these religious dissensions and distinctions, but yet you talk of brotherly […]
Celebrating Toni Morrison
American literary scholar Arnold Weinstein writes in Recovering Your Story: Toni Morrison is unquestionably the great inheritor of the giant figures of the early twentieth century—Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner; she is the proof that what they wrought is still going strong. Time, consciousness, history, the inside story: All this is at the heart of […]