Year A – Session 1

ONLINE

Business Week, “The Rise and Fall of a Corporate Headhunter” (April 2, 2007). In our own time, the stories of the rise and fall of business are not just about corporate successes and failures, but about the lives of those who participated in those business dramas, and their search for personal meaning. This is an online-only resource.

PBS podcasts (require RealPlayer): “Looking Back on the Fall of Enron,” “The History of Enron,” “Book Tracks Enron’s Rise and Fall.” Download to your iPod and listen while you commute. This is an online-only resource – after all it’s an audio file!

PRINT RESOURCES INCLUDED IN THE LEARNING NOTEBOOK

Resource Group #1:  Personal Stories.

·         “St. Francis of Assisi,” from The Catholic Encyclopedia.  The story of the founder of the monastic movement bearing his name, the Franciscan Order.  A child of wealth and privilege, Francis gave up all his possessions and embraced material poverty along with the riches of creation.  He is a thought-provoking ‘saint’ for Faith and Everyday Leadership.   Resource/Reading #1

Resource Group #2:  Professional stories. 

·         Studs Terkel, Working, “Ray Wax. Stockbroker,” 333-340. Our personal stories are often deeply entwined with the stories of our professional lives.  Here is a story of a former stockbroker turned land-speculator, whose professional story is told here in his words.  Resource/Reading # 4.

Resource Group #3: Congregational Stories.

·         Diana Butler Bass, The Practicing Congregation, 91-102.  “I Love to Tell the Story.” The final chapter of Bass’s groundbreaking book on mainline congregational vitality and decline and re-emergence. Resource/Reading # 6.

·         Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, 155-166.  Here Taylor, who left parish ministry to be a college professor, writes about the joys of learning to “meet God after work … wherever God shows up.” Resource/Reading # 7.

Resource Group #4: God Stories. 

·         Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, 128-29. “The Love of the Creature.”  Anglican novelist and playwright Dorothy Sayers presents her own pithy and poetic portrayal of the central God-story for Christians, that of God’s coming in Jesus to live, suffer and die for us.  Resource/Reading # 8.

·         Herbert O’Driscoll, Conversations in Time, “Jacob the Operator,” 9-18.  An imagined conversation between O’Driscoll and Jacob, the son of Isaac and Rebekah in Genesis who steals the inheritance of his brother Esau.  Like so many who become leaders in faith and work, Jacob was not without his own significant faults, but became a leader of his people nonetheless. Resource/Reading # 9.