Parker J. Palmer is an author, educator, and activist who focuses on issues in education, community, leadership, spirituality and social change. He completed his undergraduate work at Carleton College and earned a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley (1970). He served for fifteen years as senior associate at the American Association of Higher Education and is the founder of the Center for Courage & Renewal. In 1998, a national survey of 10,000 educators named Palmer one of the 30 “most influential senior leaders” in higher education. In 2010, he received the William Rainey Harper Award and in 2011, Utne Reader named him one of twenty-five “People Who are Changing the World.” He has published a dozen poems, more than one hundred essays and eight books.

Dr. David M. Keirsey served as Chair and Faculty in the Department of Counseling for ten years at California State University (Fullerton). He published Please Understand Me in 1978, which introduced the Keirsey Temperament Sorter to the public. In 1998, he published Please Understand Me II, by which time his ideas on temperament theory were being widely utilized by Fortune 500 corporations, government institutions, non-profit, ... and educational organizations worldwide. He began constructing his temperament schema in the 1950's while practicing as an educational psychologist and consultant. Dr. Keirsey founded Advisor Team Inc. in 1996. This company offers solutions for conflict resolution, employee interaction, team building, team synergy, recruitment and hiring, leadership development, employee retention, customer strategy, sales tactics, marketing and messaging, customer engagement, teamwork, and organizational alignment. The company also provides assessment reports for individual, team, and organizational analysis; and Temperament Certification and the Synergy Leaders Coaching certifications, as well as consulting, training, and coaching services.

Summary of Contents

The author provides a thorough historical background of temperament theory, beginning with Plato (4th century BCE) and culminating with the work of Isabel Myers (1958). Having established a basic schema of four temperaments, Keirsey distinguishes his categorizations (Artisan, Guardian, Idealist, Rational) from the Myers-Briggs groupings (SP, SJ, NF, NT) and discusses each of the temperaments at length. The author emphasizes the danger of what he calls the “Pygmalion Project.” This is the tendency to interpret others’ differences from one’s own way of acting or approaching reality as “wrong” and as something to be corrected. This leads to furtive attempts to change other people’s natural personality and temperament, which can only exacerbate problems. The author provides a discussion of how each of the temperaments approach mating (chapter 7), parenting (chapter 8), and leadership (chapter 9). This edition features an updated temperament sorter (4-11) which allows the reader to determine his or her MBTI type. For those interested in simply discovering temperament, the author provides a sixteen question “type sorter” (341).

The overarching thesis of Dallas Willard’s book The Great Omission is that present day American congregations, across the denominational spectrum, are content to settle for merely adding membership at the expense of moving “members” toward a more mature expression of “discipleship.” 

The author emphasizes that deliberately choosing to be a disciple of Jesus is crucial, and that modern Christianity has made discipleship “optional” at best and “unexpected” for the majority of those on church rosters. The “great omission” of intentional discipleship in the contemporary church is the basis for the title of the book. Willard emphasizes that when a person decides to take Jesus seriously, this choice needs to be fleshed out through the practices and activities of the classic disciplines of the Christian life. Such activities might include prayer, fellowship, service, study, simplicity, chastity, solitude, and fasting, among many others. Willard contends these activities lead to spiritual transformation, which manifests as growth in the fruits of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23).

Biographical Sketch of the Author

Dr. Samir Selmanovic, Ph.D, is the director of Citylights (an emergent Christian community) and serves on the Interfaith Relations Commission of the National Council of Churches. He is a founder of Faith House Manhattan, an interfaith “community of communities” that brings together Christians, Muslims, Jews, atheists and others who seek to learn from different belief systems. Dr. Selmanovic is a key personality of the emerging church movement, serving on the Coordinating Group for Emergent Village and co-founder of Re-church, a network of church leaders. He pastored a multi-ethnic church in Manhattan for six years, which provided him with an understanding of Western attitudes towards religion. He has published many articles on the role of religious organizations in postmodernity and is a contributor to the books “Emergent Manifesto of Hope” (Baker, 2007) and “Justice Project” (Baker, 2009).

Losses are inevitable and are ever present in all lives. Grief is a normal response to loss whether the loss involves the loss of a job or a demotion, divorce, a house that burns down, a favorite car that is destroyed in a wreck, an “F” on a report card, a move, or any of the other losses each of us experiences as we live our lives. Grief is a normal reaction to any loss and is experienced holistically--physically, emotionally, socially, and spiritually.

Henri Nouwen provides great insight into the spiritual dynamics of grief, loss, and coping with death in The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom. For spiritual directors guiding grieving people and those experiencing various personal crises, Nouwen’s journal can be a great tool to open the directee to expressing what he or she is experiencing deep within one’s being.

Biographical Sketch of the Author

Karen Armstrong, a former Roman Catholic nun, has written more than 20 books on religious affairs—including A History of God, The Battle for God, Holy War, Islam, Buddha, The Great Transformation, and The Case for God—and two memoirs, Through the Narrow Gate and The Spiral Staircase. In these works, she explores faith in the context of the major world religions, focusing on how faith shapes world history and drives current events. In February 2008 she was awarded the TED Prize, ($100,000) given by a small nonprofit devoted to “ideas worth spreading.” She has been working on a “Charter for Compassion,” created online by the general public and crafted by leading religious thinkers in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. The charter was signed in November 2009 by a thousand religious and secular leaders. She lives in London.

Biographical Sketch of the Author

M. Robert Mulholland Jr. has been on the faculty (New Testament) at Asbury Theological Seminary since 1979.  He holds an undergraduate degree from the U.S. Naval Academy, a M.Div. from Wesley Theological Seminary, and a Th.D. from the Harvard Divinity School. He is the author of several books on Scripture and spiritual formation.  He is currently a consulting editor for The Journal of Spiritual Formation and Soul Care.

Summary of Contents

Mulholland developed this book from a retreat he gave to ordained and diaconal Methodist ministers. In Part I, Mulholland’s basic theme of “spiritual formation is a process of being conformed to the image of Christ for the sake of others” (12) is introduced with subsequent chapters devoted to a fuller development of each clause. The author proposes that his definition of spiritual formation will help the reader move successfully “against the grain” of cultural dynamics, which he believes “works against holistic spirituality” (13). Part II is a treatment of the interplay of modern temperament theory (Myers-Briggs) and spiritual formation. Mulholland shows that spirituality is not a “one size fits all” proposition and because “we are unique persons, and our relationship with God always manifests that individuality, our process of spiritual formation toward wholeness may be very different from others” (13). Part III addresses a number of well known spiritual “disciplines,” which the author develops in follow on chapters as either “classic disciplines” or “personal disciplines” and how these interact to move one along the journey.  Mulholland concludes the work with a section on corporate and social spirituality, which he contends is “an aspect that is frequently missed in the faddishness of spiritual formation these days” (14).

Biographical Sketch of the Author

Marcus J. Borg is Canon Theologian at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland, Oregon.  He is a fellow of the Jesus Seminar, holds a D.Phil degree from Oxford University and held the Hundere Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture, an endowed chair, at Oregon State University, until his retirement. He is a columnist for Beliefnet and a contributor to several of the Living the Questions DVD series. He has been national chair of the Historical Jesus Section of the Society of Biblical Literature, co-chair of its International New Testament Program Committee and president of the Anglican Association of Biblical Scholars. As the author of nineteen books, Dr. Borg is among the most widely-known and influential scholars within the progressive wing of American Christianity.

Summary of Contents

The author presents his text in three main parts. The first section is highly autobiographical and provides the context of the author’s struggles with faith as a youth. Borg describes the concept of God he received in his religious tradition (Lutheran) and how this initial understanding of God failed to sustain him through his adolescence and early adulthood. He then shows how this concept has dramatically changed in the second half of the author’s life, an event which he describes as “meeting God again for the first time.” This experience is the basis for the title of the work and the author’s invitation to the reader to have that same experience. In the second section, Borg unpacks the central thesis of the text: “My central claim is very direct: our concept of God matters” (11) and explains how a person’s image of God influences their concept of spirituality and the sacred encounter. Borg argues that how a person images God will influence and color their entire concept of the divine, which will directly impact their spiritual development, either promoting or retarding the growth. The author concludes the book with challenges to modern American Christians in regard to seeking an authentic relationship with God through opening one’s heart to the already present God (panentheism), in regard to allowing God to speak correction to conventional socio-political agendas, and in regard to the very narrow understanding of “salvation” held by many Christians.

Biographical Sketch of the Author

Thomas Merton, O.C.S.O.  (known as “Fr. Louis” in the Trappist monastery, Bardstown, KY) a popular and influential 20th century American, Roman Catholic author and mystical theologian, was born on 31 January 1915 in Prades, southern France. The young Merton attended schools in France, England, and the United States. He attended Columbia University in New York City (1935-38) and entered the Catholic Church in 1938 following a dramatic conversion experience. Merton entered the monastic community of the Abbey of Gethsemani on December  10, 1941. The abbot urged Merton to write his autobiography (The Seven Storey Mountain), published in 1948, which became a best-seller.

In 1949, he was ordained to the priesthood and during the next 20 years, Merton wrote prolifically (more than 70 books) on the contemplative life, prayer, and religious biographies. These works often included controversial issues such as race relations, violence, nuclear war, and economic injustice. Merton was a leading figure in ecumenical relations following Vatican II and was one of the first Catholics to enter into serious dialog with eastern religions, including the Dalai Lama, D.T. Suzuki, and Thich Nhat Hanh. Merton died by accidental electrocution in Bangkok, Thailand, while attending an interfaith meeting of religious leaders on December 10, 1968.