Barnabas File

In his book The New Leadership Literacies , Bob Johansen tells the story of American railroads in the 19 th century.  Telegraph companies came to the railroad owners--ambitious people we often refer to as “robber barons” --and asked if they could string telegraph wires along the tracks.  The railroad people thought this would help them keep up with their trains and agreed.  If they had been able to “see beyond the edges” of their business, they could have done this themselves and controlled wired communications.  They could have become AT&T!  Why did they miss this opportunity?   Johansen writes: “They missed it because they loved trains too much.  Also, their centralized organizational structure made it hard to see to the edges of their own businesses.  Shape-shifting organizations will make this much easier, since there is no center and they grow from the edges.” I won’t take the time here to discuss “shape-shifting organi...

Country Courthouse--Daily  News Journal photo Murfreesboro, Tennessee, is a good place to live.   Most Saturdays this time of year, you will find people browsing and purchasing from vendors at the Farmers’ Market around the County Courthouse.   Shops and restaurants on the Square will bustle with business.   The local university will be hosting a high school band competition that brings participants from all over the mid-South.   Children will be getting ready for a visit to a “haunted mansion” to raise money for historic conservation. None of that will happen today, because White Lives Matter is coming to town.  All the activities mentioned above have been cancelled.  The courthouse square will be cordoned off, protestors and counter-protestors will gather, businesses have boarded their windows, and law enforcement will be out in strength. Why Murfreesboro?  The city handled school integration in the 60s with little ...

Dr. John Perkins and the author There are some battles that must be fought continuously.   We often succumb to the idea that once certain victories are won, an issue is settled.   More than once, I have heard people say, “We have dealt with the idea of women being pastors; let’s move on.”   This is far from true as churches that seek to exercise their autonomy, deciding that the best qualified person to be their pastor is a woman, are disfellowshipped from the larger community of faith. This is true of racism as well.  We have come a long way to be sure.  The sports heroes of one of my grandsons are African Americans like Odell Beckham, Jr., of the New York Giants; Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors; and Olympian Jesse Owens. My children and grandchildren don’t see race as a barrier, but racism is embedded in our society.  White supremacy is resurgent, white privilege is an uncomfortable fact, and institutional racism is a...

Thurgood Marshall was a civil rights icon.  As founder of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, he argued 32 cases before the U. S. Supreme Court and won all but three. The most notable may have been Brown v. Board of Education which threw out the “separate but equal” approach to public education. In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson appointed him as the first African American to sit on the Supreme Court. Rather than attempt to tell Marshall’s life story, the film Marshall selects one case in which he was involved In 1941 when he was hopping across the country by train to defend African-Americans.  In this case he works with local attorney Sam Friedman to defend a man accused of raping his employer’s wife. Although this is in some ways a standard court room drama, the film summarizes the challenge of finding justice for African Americans as well as the prejudice against Jews while America was fighting the Nazis and Jews in Europe were being sent to death camps. ...

A recent news report explained that a school district in Mississippi had removed Harper Lee’s classic, To Kill a Mockingbird from a middle school reading list because the book's language "makes people uncomfortable."  I am offended by this on two levels.  First, this is one of my favorite books.  The book and film that came from it both challenged my prejudices and gave me hope for a better society.  Second, we need to read things that make us uncomfortable.  If we only read those who agree with us, we stagnate.  Listening to others’ ideas and experiences help us to grow. As my friend John Tyler posted on Facebook in response to this report: “If I followed this ‘thinking’ at home, I'd pull all my Bibles from the shelves. Most of what Jesus says, as reported on the Bible's pages, makes me uncomfortable. Learning, growing, and adopting new perspectives and behaviors can be painful experiences.  Very often, change and pain...