Living in More Than One World

Last week, I wrote for the second time on 50 Philosophy Classics, the new book by Tom Butler-Bowdon. One of Tom’s featured books is 1843’s Fear and Trembling, by the Danish philosopher-theologian Søren Kierkegaard. The 200th anniversary of Kierkegaard’s birth was celebrated on May 5th, and there will be activities throughout the year in his native Copenhagen and elsewhere.

Much of my interest in Kierkegaard stems from Peter Drucker’s deeply personal 1949 Sewanee Review essay, “The Unfashionable Kierkegaard,” which was anthologized in his 1993 book The Ecological Vision. In the essay, Drucker describes Fear and Trembling as “my favorite among Kierkegaard’s books.” As I wrote in 2011, Joseph A. Maciariello and Karen E. Linkletter examined this essay eloquently in their book Drucker’s Lost Art of Management.

You can also find a commentary on the essay by Richard Brem on the Drucker Society of Austria website, followed by the text itself. A highly interesting typewritten manuscript on the Drucker Archives website contains the text of a lecture, “Søren Kierkegaard: Or, How is Human Existence Possible?” It was given by Drucker 70 years ago yesterday, on May 20, 1943, at Bennington College, where he was teaching at the time.

Most people will not travel to Copenhagen to celebrate, but there is considerable reading online, including Judith Thurman’s post on newyorker.com; a post on Free Exchange, the economics blog of The Economist, and an op/ed in The New York Times, “Kierkegaard at 200,” by Gordon Marino, professor of philosophy and director of the Howard and Edna Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College, in Minnesota. For the time being, Oxford Journals is providing free access to selected Kierkegaard-themed articles.

Perhaps reading this material will provide the spark to attend one of the upcoming events, or to visit Copenhagen to see where Kierkegaard lived his relatively short, but influential life.

Last week I wrote the first of several installments about the new book Drucker: A Life in Pictures, by Rick Wartzman, Executive Director of the Drucker Institute; with photos by Anne Fishbein (whose work has been displayed in many major museums and galleries), and curated by Drucker Institute archivist Bridget Lawlor. The content reveals a lot about Peter Drucker’s work processes, the thought that underpinned his work, and how varied that work was. In the previous post I mentioned the notes from leaders in business, politics and even baseball. But his involvement and influence extended beyond these worlds. One of the most eye-opening pages contains a short letter to Drucker from the legendary labor leader Cesar Chavez, from February 8, 1982, looking forward to their next meeting ten days later. (Would this be the type of formality taken care of in an email these days?)

Drucker’s social sector work has been well-documented, and is reinforced by the visuals here. He consulted in the 1980s during the tenure of Frances Hesselbein as CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA, and pages 98-99 display photos of Drucker’s Girl Scouts sash and lifetime membership. After retiring as CEO, Hesselbein, Bob Buford and Richard F. Schubert started the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, in 1990. (It’s now called the Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute, and with Jossey-Bass, co-publishes the quarterly journal Leader to Leader, where I have been managing editor since 2011.) Buford, the chairman emeritus of the Drucker Institute, was a longtime friend, colleague and consulting partner of Drucker’s. He’s represented by an 8-point document from 2002, “What Peter Drucker Does For Me.” Buford was instrumental in introducing Drucker to people who eventually led the megachurch phenomenon, which I first learned about through Drucker’s writings in the 1990s. One of its major figures, Saddleback Church Pastor Rick Warren, also had a longstanding relationship with Drucker. On the page opposite Buford’s is a picture of a specially-personalized copy of Warren’s huge-selling book The Purpose Driven Life.

I’ll continue my exploration into Drucker: A Life in Pictures next week. Until then, it’s worth reflecting on not just how Peter Drucker led a life of such significance and influence in so many spheres, but how we can as well.

It’s been three weeks since I’ve been in Claremont, California; where I spent several days at the Drucker School and elsewhere at Claremont Graduate University and The Claremont Colleges. Now the new, Fall 2012 issue of The Flame, CGU’s excellent quarterly magazine, is available in print and online. I’ve been reading this regularly since my first visit to Claremont in 2002, when I began researching my book Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life.
The article  “A Hunger for Change” profiles Badiul Alam Majumdar, Vice President and Country Director, The Hunger Project-Bangladesh. More than 20 years ago, he gave up a tenured teaching position at Washington State University to return to Bangladesh, the country of his birth, to make a different type of difference in the world. He was one of Drucker’s earliest students at Claremont in the early 1970s.
What is the relationship of football and other sports to positive psychology and flow? That is what retired NFL player Damian Vaughn is trying to determine, as related in the article “Football, Flow, and Finding Your Way After Tearing an Achilles Tendon.” Vaughn now consults with athletes and business people on finding flow and peak performance, and is studying at CGU’s School of Behavioral and Organizational Sciences (SBOS). He’s also working on two pilot studies at CGU’s Quality of Life Research Center with the founder of flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whom I wrote about for USA TODAY in 2003.
There is also an enlightening Q&A, “The Mormon Moment, In Context” (three pages in the magazine, but extended online) with Patrick Q. Mason, the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies and Associate Professor of North American Religion at CGU’s School of Religion (SOR). Besides providing additional context on Mormonism and Mitt Romney, Mason also discusses his own life as a scholar and author, including the important role The Autobiography of Malcolm X has played in that life. “One of the reasons I like Malcolm,” Mason says, “personally and spiritually, is because he was a spiritual pilgrim. His life is a remarkable one of assimilating truth and searching for truth.”

Marc Allen, the publisher of New World Library, has written a recent post about the fact that eight of the company’s authors have been included in Mind Body Spirit magazine’s 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People. The list itself is pretty fascinating, with the Dalai Lama at #1 and New World Library authors Eckhart Tolle at #2 and Deepak Chopra at #4.  No matter what your system of belief, or unbelief may be, the best spiritually-oriented writers serve a wonderful purpose by helping readers to understand and interpret the deepest meanings in life.

Lists like the one in Mind Body Spirit help guide us to high-quality writers, but there are other valuable resources. Every year I look forward to The Best Spiritual Writing series, edited by Philip Zaleski and now published by Penguin. The 2012 edition collects articles and poems that have appeared recently in magazines and journals, including “A Chapel is Where You Can Hear Something Beating Below Your Heart,” by one of my favorite writers, Pico Iyer. He has contributed often to the series, including writing the introduction to the 2010 book. And each year Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat choose the Best Spiritual Books of the Year, categorized by topic, from the more than 300 reviewed each year on the Spirituality & Practice site. Another terrific resource is the 2005 book 50 Spiritual Classics, part of the 50 Classics series by Tom Butler-Bowdon. Tom’s website generously includes free full text of many of the chapters, including one on Tolle’s 1999 breakthrough book, The Power of Now. Unsurprisingly, there is considerable crossover between this list and the 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People. Who are your favorite spiritual writers? Do they appear on these lists?

Coverage of religion and spirituality has been downsized or eliminated by many newspapers in recent years. But there still is a lot of writing and reporting about these topics online, on radio and television and in magazines. Some newspapers have shifted more of their coverage away from print into blogs. Cathy Lynn Grossman, who covers this beat for USA TODAY both in the newspaper itself and in her Faith & Reason blog, presents four concise profiles of journalists who currently or have reported on religion, each of whom have personal books on the subject, in A window into the faith of religion reporters. The four, and their books are: Barbara Bradley Hagerty (National Public Radio; Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality); Peter Manseau (editor of Search: The Magazine of Science, Religion and Culture; Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World’s Holy Dead); Cathleen Falsani, (Chicago Sun-Times religion columnist and blogger; Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace) and William Lobdell (former Los Angeles Times religion reporter; Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America — and Found Unexpected Peace).  Cathy, who is a former colleague of mine at USA TODAY, does a nice job of weaving together material about the books with personal information on the authors and quotes from each. The different takes by each author on their state of belief (and now unbelief, in Lobdell’s case) hints at the immensity of the world of religion, and why it’s a subject that deserves to be explored and covered seriously by the media.

Lisa Miller of Newsweek has a revealing interview/feature on Huston Smith. The 90 year old religion author-professor has an important new book:  Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography. The foreword was written by Pico Iyer, whom I referenced in the May 2 blog on Geoff Dyer. (Iyer’s book The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, recently came out in paperback.) Smith is known for his million-selling book The World’s Religions, originally published in 1958 as The Religions of Man.  It was also completely revised and updated when it was renamed in 1991. He was also the subject of a fascinating, five part PBS series in 1996, The Wisdom of Faith, a series of interviews conducted by Bill Moyers. I’ve long considered Smith to be a Peter Drucker-like figure. Both remained relevant and productive deep into old age, were renowned authors, professors and wisdom figures, and were considered to be at the top of their field.  Drucker was also interviewed by Moyers, for a PBS program in 1988, but not as extensively. Smith includes an anecdote about Drucker in the 2001 book Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief. In addition, there are commonalities in the writing styles of Smith and Drucker: both are clear and compelling, and adept at conveying ideas to wide, diverse readerships. I don’t know if the two knew each other. It’s reasonable to think their paths must have crossed at some point. If anyone has the answer, I’d love to hear about it!

My former USA TODAY colleague Cathy Grossman, who writes and blogs on the religion beat, says on her Faith & Reason blog that she travels to the UK in April, where she’ll be in Cambridge covering and blogging about a “four day seminar with theologians and scientists talking about evolution, consciousness and the brain.”

It will be her second stint in the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science and Religion. One of my favorite prizes of the year is the Templeton Prize, which is announced on March 16.