The Narrow Path To Expansive Vision

"You can buy The Narrow Path to Expansive Vision online at any major online bookstore, or through the Westbow website." We live in a country deeply divided politically and culturally, and the chasm widens and deepens with each passing day. As a society, it seems like there is an increasing tendency to follow the wrong things and the wrong people. So where do we turn to find a leadership example in an “all about me” world? How do you live and lead a narrow-path (yet not narrow-minded) life in a wide-path world and society? You turn to the greatest leadership example in history: Jesus Christ. This may seem like an obvious answer, but it is not. In conducting original research for the book The Narrow Path to Expansive Vision, RD (Randy) Oostra completed a national online survey of business leaders, including those who identified as Christian leaders. One question on the survey asked those who identified as Christian leaders to name their top three leaders of all time. Only 13 percent mentioned Christ as one of their top three leaders. In addition, only 43 percent of these Christian leaders considered themselves to be servant leaders. As The Narrow Path to Expansive Vision unfolds, it weaves a narrative of Randy’s personal journey growing up in a rigorous Dutch Reformation background to his life as a CEO of a national health and well-being organization. Randy tells his story of how he has lived in and navigated through the science-based world of health care, as well as his frustrations with a Church leadership that frankly has not always been helpful in meeting the challenges he faced as a business leader, and in life in general. Based on these experiences, Randy offers a foundational approach to leadership inspired by the example of Christ. It is a hopeful message that both believers and non-believers will find meaningful and useful.

We live in a country deeply divided politically and culturally, and the chasm widens and deepens with each passing day. As a society, it seems like there is an increasing tendency to follow the wrong things and the wrong people. So where do we turn to find a leadership example in an "all about me" world? How do you live and lead a narrow-path (yet not narrow-minded) life in a wide-path world and society? You turn to the greatest leadership example in history: Jesus Christ. This may seem like an obvious answer, but it is not. In conducting original research for the book The Narrow Path to Expansive Vision, RD (Randy) Oostra completed a national online survey of business leaders, including those who identified as Christian leaders. One question on the survey asked those who identified as Christian leaders to name their top three leaders of all time. Only 13 percent mentioned Christ as one of their top three leaders. In addition, only 43 percent of these Christian leaders considered themselves to be servant leaders. As The Narrow Path to Expansive Vision unfolds, it weaves a narrative of Randy's personal journey growing up in a rigorous Dutch Reformation background to his life as a CEO of a national health and well-being organization. Randy tells his story of how he has lived in and navigated through the science-based world of health care, as well as his frustrations with a Church leadership that frankly has not always been helpful in meeting the challenges he faced as a business leader, and in life in general. Based on these experiences, Randy offers a foundational approach to leadership inspired by the example of Christ. It is a hopeful message that both believers and non-believers will find meaningful and useful.

Originally published in 1963, The Landsorganisationen I Sverige (LO – Swedish Confederation of Trades Unions), enjoys an international reputation as a trade union movement with progressive ideas on wage policy and collective bargaining. The authors of this volume who are trade union economists, deal critically with credit policy; plead for free trade; are outspoken on company taxation, wage policy, the labour market and the location of industry. Throughout the authors are outspoken in their emphasis on growth and change, which they interpret as change in the outlook of the unions as well as in that of industry and of the government.

In one of his pieces of literary criticism Georg Lukács wrote that 'there is autonomy and 'autonomy.' The one is a moment of life itself, the elevation of its richness and contradictory unity; the other is a rigidification, a barren self-seclusion, a self-imposed banishment from the dynamic overall connection.' But it has always been difficult to see how rigidification can be avoided without making the boundaries of the self so malleable that its autonomy looks like a sham. Yeomans explores Hegel's own attempts to grapple with this problem against the background of Kant's attempts, in his theory of virtue, to understand the way that morally autonomous agents can be robust individuals with qualitatively different projects, personal relations and commitments that are nonetheless infused with a value that demands respect.

Drawing on the writings of German pastor-theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Jennifer M. McBride constructs a groundbreaking theology of public witness for Protestant church communities in the United States. In contrast to the triumphal manner in which many Protestants have engaged the public sphere, The Church for the World shows how the church can offer a nontriumphal witness to the lordship of Christ through repentant activity in public life. After investigating current Christian conceptions of witness in the United States, McBride offers a new theology for repentance as public witness, based on Bonhoeffer's thought concerning Christ, the world, and the church. McBride takes up Bonhoeffer's proposal that repentance may be reinterpreted "non-religiously," expanding and challenging common understandings of the concept. Finally, she examines two church communities that exemplify ecclesial commitments and practices rooted in confession of sin and repentance. Through these communities she demonstrates that confession and repentance may be embodied in various ways yet also discerns distinguishing characteristics of a redemptive public witness. The Church for the World offers important insights about Christian particularity and public engagement in a pluralistic society as it provides a theological foundation for public witness that is simultaneously bold and humble: when its mode of being in the world is confession of sin unto repentance, the church demonstrates Christ's redemptive work and becomes a vehicle of concrete redemption.

Rosa Luxemburg was a revolutionary socialist who fought and died for her beliefs. In January 1919, after being arrested for her involvement in a workers' uprising in Berlin, she was brutally murdered by a group of right-wing soldiers. Her body was recovered days later from a canal. Six years earlier she had published what was undoubtedly her finest achievement, The Accumulation of Capital - a book which remains one of the masterpieces of socialist literature. Taking Marx as her starting point, she offers an independent and fiercely critical explanation of the economic and political consequences of capitalism in the context of the turbulent times in which she lived, reinterpreting events in the United States, Europe, China, Russia and the British Empire. Many today believe there is no alternative to global capitalism. This book is a timely and forceful statement of an opposing view.

It is well known that individualism and consumerism are so pervasive that they have become the spectacles through which we view and understand our lives, including our spirituality. Sadly we keep these glasses on as we read our Bibles, and in the process we allow our reading to reinforce our individualism. Many readers and expositors of the Bible take verses without due concern for their context. In the process, verses that were originally intended to be understood within a community setting are made to mean something different from what their authors intended. One of the most serious consequences is that passages which refer to our community life are made to reinforce our individualism. This is not handling the 'Word of Truth' correctly. In We Not Me Andy Matheson argues that we need to embrace the perspective of 'the God who sees'. His vision is relational; he sees with communal lenses. Community is so core to God's nature and purposes that it undergirds everything that is implicitly inferred or explicitly stated on every page of the Bible. If we can rediscover what it means to be a community - the kind of community where all barriers are broken down and where our lives reflect the original vision of the gospel - then we play a much more effective part in ushering in God's Kingdom.