A Monastic Model of Leadership for Turbulent Times

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Short Description

A private university in the U.S.A. has taken graduate students to a Benedictine monastery as part of a course "Leadership and Community" for 15 years. Teachers and students of this experience will discuss how the understanding and experience of a monastic community leads to effectively engaging the world during turbulent times.

Detailed Abstract

These are turbulent times. Refugees are pouring out of the Middle-east into Europe and elsewhere, driven by violence between government and radical Islamic forces. Besides antagonism toward the mostly Muslim refugees, a virulent anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe, and nationalist political parties are gaining power throughout the West. In Great Britain, citizens voted to exit from the European Union; in the United States, the recent presidential election campaign overturned the traditional values of civility and truthfulness, and a candidate who marginalized immigrants and Muslims was elected. A growing sense of disorder, angst, and malaise is gripping the world.
Disorder, angst, and malaise are words that also may be used to describe the social, political and moral climate of sixth-century Europe, where the order established by the Roman Empire had collapsed into political and social chaos. It was within this world that a Christian monk named Benedict of Nursia led a small community of men to nurture stability, receptivity, and a commitment to relationship. Benedict’s model was based upon a three-century tradition of Christian ascetics Christians separating themselves from society, originally withdrawing into the Egyptian desert (Merton, 1960).
Why did Benedict and monks who followed in his path leave society to live in isolated communities? A common motive was to disentangle themselves from a society increasingly devoid of respect for human dignity and community (Chittister, 1997): therefore, their rejection of society was not a rejection of community, but rather a rejection of what they saw as the systematic oppression of people that made community impossible (Merton, 1960).
The Organizational Leadership program of a private university in the Pacific Northwest U.S.A. has taken graduate students to a Benedictine monastery as part of a course on "Leadership and Community" for 15 years; this 1500-year old tradition and its current embodiment serves as a rich metaphor for leadership in turbulent times. Teachers and former students of this leadership experience will discuss the following questions:
1. What does an ancient practice have to offer for modern problems?
2. How can leadership students learn about engaging the world from their experience of a community that has left the world (Block, 2009)?
3. Why is the experience of living in a monastery so essential to this experience (Rivera, 2012)?

Participants

• Michael R. Carey, Gonzaga University

• Dung Q. Tran, Seattle University

• John H. Horsman, Gonzaga University

• Belinda S. Han, Utah Valley University