Above The Fray

Life is an ever changing and often unpredictable sequence of events that rarely fulfills our expectations or desires. And yet in the long run, if we can be objective in our assessment, we find that unpredictable and challenging events invariably contribute to our growth and maturity. Could it be that adversity is a message and a gift from Infinite Wisdom? Is it possible to perceive perfection in all things simply by changing our point of view? Is there some body of secret knowledge that when applied can allow us to find meaning and clarity in all events? Yes, yes, and triple yes. By increasing our level of awareness, we can render all concerns, obstacles, misfortunes, and mistakes as utterly irrelevant. This is a powerful statement that may take some radical examination of our present approach to life on planet earth, but perhaps up until the present moment, we have missed something that in retrospect would seem very obvious. It would be very beneficial if we could accept as perfect even the harshest of lifes difficulties. Oh, looking back over the past ten years of ones life experience, one might finally admit that the lesson learned was necessary and even desired; however it required too many years of suffering to finally reach such a conclusion. Increasing ones level of awareness, and applying concepts that have been taught throughout the ages, coupled with a sprinkling of new scientific breakthroughs, potentially could lessen or even eliminate this suffering. The illusions of insanity that seemingly permeate our lives will become important tools in the ascent of our journey into Awareness.

The premise of "Above the Fray" is that the Information Age is creating a turbulence most business owners fail to acknowledge or take steps to profitably manage. "Above the Fray" offers a method of creating a vision that produces clarity. It teaches how to create plans with a bias toward action and speed of implementation. It suggests a systems approach to hiring the right team members who can handle today’s fast-paced environment. Readers will discover how to create a management methodology that ensures alignment and commitment to their vision. Revealed are marketing systems and strategies that set their companies apart from competition along with metrics that measure real-time performance. Collectively, these concepts create more effective business leaders, all better prepared to thrive in today’s turbulent business word.

From Lake Chad to Iraq, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) provide relief around the globe, and their scope is growing every year. Policy makers and activists often assume that humanitarian aid is best provided by these organizations, which are generally seen as impartial and neutral. In Above the Fray, Shai M. Dromi investigates why the international community overwhelmingly trusts humanitarian NGOs by looking at the historical development of their culture. With a particular focus on the Red Cross, Dromi reveals that NGOs arose because of the efforts of orthodox Calvinists, demonstrating for the first time the origins of the unusual moral culture that has supported NGOs for the past 150 years. Drawing on archival research, Dromi traces the genesis of the Red Cross to a Calvinist movement working in mid-nineteenth-century Geneva. He shows how global humanitarian policies emerged from the Red Cross founding members’ faith that an international volunteer program not beholden to the state was the only ethical way to provide relief to victims of armed conflict. By illustrating how Calvinism shaped the humanitarian field, Dromi argues for the key role belief systems play in establishing social fields and institutions. Ultimately, Dromi shows the immeasurable social good that NGOs have achieved, but also points to their limitations and suggests that alternative models of humanitarian relief need to be considered.

This volume engages the work of Walter Brueggemann, most of which has been published by Fortress Press. The volume centers on the character of God in the text of the Old Testament as a site of theological tension and even ambivalence. Biblical faith never experiences God as entirely above the fray but rather as entangled in history, astonishingly transformative, and impinged upon by the voices of the suffering. Brueggemann's monumental Theology of the Old Testament addresses this fact with great theological insight and rigor, and the internationally renowned biblical scholars writing here engage and extend his insights into the "unsettled Character . . . at the center of the text."

Charlotte Gill spent twenty years working as a tree planter in Canadian forests. In this book, she examines the environmental impact of logging and celebrates the value of forests from a perspective of some one whose work caught them between environmentalists and loggers.

In 1974, women in a feminist consciousness-raising group in Eugene, Oregon, formed a mock organization called the Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society. Emblazoning its logo onto t-shirts, the group wryly envisioned female collective textile making as a practice that could upend conventions, threaten state structures, and wreak political havoc. Elaborating on this example as a prehistory to the more recent phenomenon of “craftivism”—the politics and social practices associated with handmaking—Fray explores textiles and their role at the forefront of debates about process, materiality, gender, and race in times of economic upheaval. Closely examining how amateurs and fine artists in the United States and Chile turned to sewing, braiding, knotting, and quilting amid the rise of global manufacturing, Julia Bryan-Wilson argues that textiles unravel the high/low divide and urges us to think flexibly about what the politics of textiles might be. Her case studies from the 1970s through the 1990s—including the improvised costumes of the theater troupe the Cockettes, the braided rag rugs of US artist Harmony Hammond, the thread-based sculptures of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, the small hand-sewn tapestries depicting Pinochet’s torture, and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt—are often taken as evidence of the inherently progressive nature of handcrafted textiles. Fray, however, shows that such methods are recruited to often ambivalent ends, leaving textiles very much “in the fray” of debates about feminized labor, protest cultures, and queer identities; the malleability of cloth and fiber means that textiles can be activated, or stretched, in many ideological directions. The first contemporary art history book to discuss both fine art and amateur registers of handmaking at such an expansive scale, Fray unveils crucial insights into how textiles inhabit the broad space between artistic and political poles—high and low, untrained and highly skilled, conformist and disobedient, craft and art.

Effective leadership requires many skills, but foremost among them is the capacity to successfully deal with conflict. Any disruption that creates a lack of alignment can trigger the conflict cycle, such as differences of opinion, competition for scarce resources and interpersonal enmity. Leading through Conflict brings together recent theory and research on interpersonal conflict and its resolution by examining the causes and consequence of conflict in groups, organizations and communities, and identifying ways that conflict can be managed and resolved. It analyzes conflict in a multi-disciplinary way, from clashes within communities to interpersonal and professional encounters. Written in an accessible way by top scholars in the field, Leading through Conflict is a must-read for academics, graduate students, undergraduates and MBA students across leadership, organizational behavior, psychology and sociology.

In modern times the relationship between the church and academy has been strained and tension-filled. Mainstream church culture has often been skeptical of Bible scholars, depicting them as self-serving intellectuals trying to out-think God by devising new and controversial interpretations. Just as well, academics have often leveled harsh critiques against church culture, painting pastors and laity as anti-intellectual pseudo-spiritualists. Entering the Fray argues that, in spite of the wide gap between the academic and ecclesiastical worlds, the modern church should be aware of the key discussions taking place among biblical scholars. To be sure, the average churchgoer has not been tuned in to scholarly conversations concerning matters such as the Messianic Secret, Q, the Historical Jesus, the pistis Christou debate, and related topics. In fact, they may have purposefully tuned out! Some, however, are simply unaware that any such dialogue has taken place, and beyond the internet, may not have the first clue as to how to explore the details. This primer seeks to function as that "first clue" by helping congregants, pastors, and students of the Bible enter into the fray of scholarly discussions that, over the last few hundred years, have shaped both the academy and church.