HerbEly

Finding God in a Technical Memo

    In his talk, Bidden or Unbidden, God is Present (audio CD) Gregory Pierce tells a story about finding God. He took his family to an Easter sunrise service in the Grand Canyon. As he says, while it was easy to find God in the Grand Canyon, he doesn’t live there. He lives in Chicago, managing a publishing company, caring for three daughters and a little league team. While he values the teachings of monastic spirituality, he calls for a spirituality that helps us to find God in the midst of noise and at work.

    Physics professor Aileen A. O’Donoghue gives us an excellent example of workplace spirituality in her March 5 America article God in Machines.

The World IsN'T Becoming More Violent Every Year

Steven Pinker writes in the The New Republic (subscription required)

In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.
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Col. Patrick Lang on Islam

I've respected Col. Lang for a long time. He blogs regularly at Sic Semper Tyrannis 2007. He is a member of the papal order of the Holy Sepulcher, a graduate of the US Army War College, and was Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East. I've linked to his blog before on the importance of understanding Arab viewpoints and on what went wrong in the intelligence community before the war in Iraq.

On Feb 7th he gave a lecture at St. Mary's University in San Antonio on Islam, in its various forms. He gives several analogies and points out differences from the way Christians understand religion. To get his lecture, go here , click on the link and take the time to watch the lecture. It will add perspective.

Desert Temptations, Beowulf, Cardinal Virtues, and Ethical Crises

    A professional association – for which I am a pro bono contributor – is developing an ethical code. The code in draft form is an excellent aid to practicing the cardinal virtue of prudence, defined as taking the right action at the right time. However, sometimes having a code and identifying the right action, however, are not enough. The virtue of fortitude is also required.

    Temptations to avoid the next right action can be overwhelming. As those of us who work in large corporations or government agencies know, the temptations come in form of the "three P's - power, pleasure and possessions. These are the three basic temptations presented to Jesus in Luke 4:1-13.

    Poet and corporate consultant David Whyte gives a vivid account of how these temptations undermine right decision in his book The Heart Aroused : Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America. On pages 42-46 Whyte quotes from Burton Raffel’s translation of Beowulf.