HerbEly

Industrial and Commercial Ministries

My Kiwanis travels in the Shenandoah valley led to contacts with Industrial and Commercial Ministries: a Caring Presence in America's places of work. Given my interest in the practice of workplace spirituality,  I met with Jan Dray, the Executive Director of ICM.

    As readers of this blog know, I’m prone to ranting and raving about how Catholic church prays and honors lay ministry within the parish, but rarely even prays for parishioners who execute their ministries in the world of work – outside of the parish.  Hence, I regard it as more than coincidental that I should learn about ICM. Their ministry is essential. Here are some extracts from their website:

ICM is an ecumenical, not-for-profit organization that equips, places, and supports volunteer chaplains in America's places of work.
...
Industrial and Commercial Ministries is an ecumenical training and placement organization which equips, places and supports clergy and laity as volunteer chaplains to serve people where they perform their daily labor.  We seek to share the message of God's care and compassion and to enhance the sensitivity of persons to the changing nature of the contemporary workplace.

As a compassionate outreach of the church, we share the message of God's care with employees and employers.  ICM chaplains serve as a supportive presence, lend a listening ear and provide effective referral to those in need.

Chaplains represent the sincere concern of the Christian community for all persons.

Our objective is to focus on the needs of the employees.  We visit the workplace on a regular schedule as well as respond to special needs or crisis situations.

We circulate where people work in an organization to become acquainted with employees and establish relationships.  When invited, we will attend small groups, company-wide events, and meetings of management and employees.

We respect the rules and regulations of the workplace and obey all safety and health guidelines.

Interactions between the Chaplain and the employee are always confidential and always free.

If you think you might be interested in becoming an ICM chaplain, go here for a schedule of classes in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Arkansas and Missouri.

Katrina: Post-Traumatic Personal Growth

There are some ghosts in today’s stories about recovery by the victims of Katrina. The GetReligion Blog defines "ghosts."

One minute they are there. The next they are gone. There are ghosts in there, hiding in the ink and the pixels. Something is missing in the basic facts or perhaps most of the key facts are there, yet some are twisted. Perhaps there are sins of omission, rather than commission.
A lot of these ghosts are, well, holy ghosts. They are facts and stories and faces linked to the power of religious faith

Here are two news stories about an ongoing study of the mental health and recovery of victims of Katrina. See if you can spot the ghosts in this story by AP writer Jeff Donn:

In a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, a new survey reveals that the traumatized survivors of Hurricane Katrina forged a surprisingly powerful inner strength that steeled them against suicidal despair.

Spiritual Principles and Practices in Intelligence Work

Here is a working abstract for the paper that I've been asked to present at the Intelligence and Ethics 2007 conference in January.

Spirituality in the Intelligence workplace – just as in every workplace – starts with the premise that our work is creative and, in some sense, a service aimed at building a more just world. In the normal case, this spirituality improves the quality of our service through the practice of specific disciplines (e.g. striving for quality; dealing with imperfections, treating colleagues with dignity). In the abnormal (we hope) case, it requires challenging superiors to ensure that the intelligence community is true to its purpose. In every case, it requires developing the faculty of discernment – intuitively knowing “the next right thing” to be done. While acquiring this faculty is ultimately a matter of personal development, it can be assisted through a program of mentoring, counseling, and training in professional skills and ethics.

Comments are invited.

Maybe This is Why

From Martha, Martha by way of Steve

You must realize that it is the ordinary way of God's dealings with us that our ideas do not work out speedily and efficiently as we would like them to. The reason for this is not only the loving wisdom of God, but also the fact that our acts have to fit into a great complex pattern that we cannot possibly understand. I have learned over the years that Providence is always a whole lot wiser than any of us, and that there are always not only good reasons but the very best reasons for the delays and blocks that often seem to us so frustrating and absurd.
(The Hidden Ground of Love, Letters by Thomas Merton)

Through a long chain of circumstances and unsuccessful attempts at other activites Second International Conference on Intelligence the Ethics of National Security and Intelligence in Springfield VA in January 26-27, 2007. I just got tagged to write a working abstract. For that, see my next post.

Now this is good news

Older and Cranky May Mean Smarter: Study suggests that personality predictors for intelligence change as you age. For some reason my family thought this was funny.

Lay Ecclesial Movements and the New Clericalism

America magazine has two articles about apostolic movements (also called lay associations) and their relationships with parish life. (Lay movements include

• Cursillo
• Worldwide Marriage Encounter
• Communion and Liberation
• Charismatic Renewal
• Community of Saint ‘Egidio

Both articles assess their contributions and their tensions with parish life.

    Not discussed, but I think related, is what writer Russell Shaw calls the “new clericalism” and the institutional church’s attitude toward the role of the laity.

Shaggy Dog in Church Story

This item about how Transcendental Mediation Lessens Brain's Pain Response reminded me of the story about the Zen monk who visited a dentist.

"Would you like a shot of Novacaine?"

"No, I know how to transcend dental medicaiton."

Sometimes, All a Father Can Do is Brag

Photographic evidence of David's latest achievement, click here.

James Fallows on the War on Terrorism

Once again, Atlantic Monthly proves worth its subscription price. Some extracts from James Fallows’ Declaring Victory. (subscription required).

This spring and summer, I talked with some sixty experts about the current state of the conflict that bin Laden thinks of as the “world jihad—and that the U.S. government has called both the “global war on terror” and the “long war.” I wanted to know how it looked from the terrorists’ perspective. What had gone better than expected? What had gone worse? Could bin Laden assume, on any grounds other than pure faith, that the winds of history were at his back? Could he and his imitators count on a growing advantage because technology has made it so easy for individuals to inflict mass damage, and because politics and the media have made it so hard for great powers to fight dirty, drawn-out wars? Or might his strategists have to conclude that, at least for this stage of what they envision as a centuries-long struggle, their best days had passed?

About half of the authorities I spoke with were from military or intelligence organizations; the others were academics or members of think tanks, plus a few businesspeople. Half were Americans; the rest were Europeans, Middle Easterners, Australians, and others. Four years ago, most of these people had supported the decision to invade Iraq. Although they now said that the war had been a mistake (followed by what nearly all viewed as a disastrously mismanaged occupation), relatively few said that the United States should withdraw anytime soon. The reasons most of them gave were the need for America to make good on commitments, the importance of keeping the Sunni parts of Iraq from turning into a new haven for global terrorists, and the chance that conditions in Iraq would eventually improve.
…
But the overall prospect looks better than many Americans believe, and better than nearly all political rhetoric asserts. The essence of the change is this: because of al-Qaeda’s own mistakes, and because of the things the United States and its allies have done right, al-Qaeda’s ability to inflict direct damage in America or on Americans has been sharply reduced. Its successor groups in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere will continue to pose dangers. But its hopes for fundamentally harming the United States now rest less on what it can do itself than on what it can trick, tempt, or goad us into doing. Its destiny is no longer in its own hands.

“Does al-Qaeda still constitute an ‘existential’ threat?” asks David Kilcullen, who has written several influential papers on the need for a new strategy against Islamic insurgents. Kilcullen, who as an Australian army officer commanded counter-insurgency units in East Timor, recently served as an adviser in the Pentagon and is now a senior adviser on counterterrorism at the State Department. He was referring to the argument about whether the terrorism of the twenty-first century endangers the very existence of the United States and its allies, as the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons did throughout the Cold War (and as the remnants of that arsenal still might).

“I think it does, but not for the obvious reasons,” Kilcullen told me. He said the most useful analogy was the menace posed by European anarchists in the nineteenth century. “If you add up everyone they personally killed, it came to maybe 2,000 people, which is not an existential threat.” But one of their number assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. The act itself took the lives of two people. The unthinking response of European governments in effect started World War I. “So because of the reaction they provoked, they were able to kill millions of people and destroy a civilization.

This is a fresh approach. We need more of it, starting with an effort to abandon war as a metaphor for the conflict with terrorists.

Greg Easterbrook on Global Warming

Atlantic Monthly is on of the few dead tree publications worth the subscription.  Here is a short extract from Greg Easterbrook’s Some Convenient Truths  article on Global Warming. (subscription required).

One reason the global-warming problem seems so daunting is that the success of previous antipollution efforts remains something of a secret. Polls show that Americans think the air is getting dirtier, not cleaner, perhaps because media coverage of the environment rarely if ever mentions improvements. For instance, did you know that smog and acid rain have continued to diminish throughout George W. Bush’s presidency?

One might expect Democrats to trumpet the decline of air pollution, which stands as one of government’s leading postwar achievements. But just as Republicans have found they can bash Democrats by falsely accusing them of being soft on defense, Democrats have found they can bash Republicans by falsely accusing them of destroying the environment. If that’s your argument, you might skip over the evidence that many environmental trends are positive. One might also expect Republicans to trumpet the reduction of air pollution, since it signifies responsible behavior by industry. But to acknowledge that air pollution has declined would require Republicans to say the words, “The regulations worked.”

I've categorized this under journalism. This is because the journalists are always looking for stories that proove that the world is getting worse. One has to read very carefully to discover such convenient truths as the fact that Clinton's welfare reforms have succeeded in reducing poverty; warfare is declining; life expectancy at birth has increased dramatically over the past 100 years; and gasoline is less expensive now than 30 years ago when measured in constant dollars.