Leadership Styles Essay

MOTIVATION Giving the input on leadership styles and influence process, we should presume the aim is to understand and improve the style of functioning as a leader. To start with, there must have clear idea as to what is meant by leadership. Leadership is the activity of influencing people to strive willingly for group objectives. This process is a function of the leader, the followers and the situation. In any situation trying to influence the behaviour of another individual or group, leadership is operating. Thus one tries leadership at one time or the other, whether activities are centred around a business, educational institution, hospital, political organization, Government organization or a family. As part of this process, one who attempts to influence the behaviour of others becomes a potential leader and the persons he is attempting to influence are the potential followers. This may happen irrespective of the fact that the leader may be their boss or a colleague (associate) or a subordinate or a friend or a relative. In other words through a style of. functioning he influences attitudes and expectations, which in turn encourage or discourage the follower’s activity or achievement, enhance or diminish the follower’s commitment to the work, etc. In our day-to-day life, we come across instances of how people are influenced by the activities or word of a person who is trying to lead them. We always make judgments about the leaders of our own office. In our mind, we make a difference between a good leader and a bad one, by judging his style or way of functioning and his influence on others. Hence, in understanding the phenomenon of leadership, priority must first understand the various styles of the leaders. [4] LEADERSHIP STYLES The word style is the way in which the leader influences followers. Person and environment function in conjunction with the behaviour itself and reciprocally interact to determine behaviour. A person, through his actions, produces the environmental conditions that affect his behaviour in a reciprocal fashion. The experience generated by behaviour also partly determines what a person becomes and can do. This in turn affects his subsequent behaviour. The theory is called social learning theory because, individuals learn in an environment in the process of interacting with each other which is a social process. The application of this theory in understanding the behaviour of a leader and the continuous reciprocal interaction between the   person (leader’s cognitions) and environment (including subordinates and their needs, experiences, objectives in the organization. abilities, skills, energy performance, etc. known as contingencies that regulate their behaviour).The three aspects of this theory of leadership assume that the leader knows how his behaviour is controlled by various needs, situations and experiences that he undergoes. The leader works with the subordinates to discover what those needs situations and experience. The leader and the subordinates jointly attempt to discover ways in which they can manage their individual behaviour to produce mutually satisfying as well as organisationally productive outcomes. In this approach, the leader and the subordinates have a negotiable and interactive relationship. They are continuously aware of how they can modify or influence each other’s behaviour by giving the rewards or holding back the performance respectively. [4,5,6] TYPES OF LEADER AND POWER CONCEPT Formal Leader A formal leader is selected by the organization. For example, a manager is a formal leader by virtue of the authority coming from the organization. He influences others to help accomplish the goals of the organization or unit. Such a leadership lasts over a long period of time Informal Leader An informal leader is chosen by the group. Thus, all managers are leaders if their authority is accepted, but not all leaders are managers. Informal leadership is leadership without position and may shift from one person to another. It may last for a brief time. Most people are leaders at one time or the other and they can have influence on others as defined by the concept of leadership. The ideal leader is the one who can combine the formals and informal leadership simultaneously within himself. SUCCESSFUL VERSUS EFFECTIVE LEADER As we have seen in the preceding discussions, leadership is the activity of influencing people to strive willingly for group objectives; it is the ability to persuade others to get something done. So the leader attempts to have some effect on the behaviour of another, which we call attempted leadership. The response to this attempt may or may not be successful. A basic responsibility of managers in any work organization is to get the work done with and through people. The success of managers is measured by the output or productivity of the group they lead. [8,10] LEADER BEHAVIOUR IN GROUPS The main aim apparently is to understand why individuals form groups. The solution lies in tracking the solution ideas: How old were you when you first joined a group? How many different groups do you belong to? How would you identify a group leader? Does your behaviour change when you are with different groups? Have you ever led a group? In what sense were you the leader? What were the results? If our own the questions should be answered, which leads to the understanding of group. Behaviour and the properties of groups are essential to being both a good manager and an effective member of groups. A manager spends half of his time in some formal or informal meetings, where a group of people get together to solve problems or make plans. So the manager himself acts as a member of a group with other managers or colleagues. Groups have a powerful effect on human behaviour. Any increase in output of those workers was because of the importance and attention given to the group of workers by their colleagues as well as their own interactions with each other about the quality and quantity of output they were supposed to produce. People are motivated to act in a certain way in a given situation and one should change the situation in order to make the people act the way one wants them to. There are also many examples where the manager decides to take a decision on his own or to rely on groups by holding meetings or making committees. In Management, small groups with which he interacts are very important for a manager. It may consist of his peers or colleagues, other managers, specialists or others who really help the manager to take an effective decision. There are instances of well knit and cohesive groups, which really make a superior performance under a good leader. For all these purposes gaining understanding of how to manage a group and how to become a more effective group member. In order to develop the above two objectives, point noted is that a group is part of a larger organization with which it interacts. [1,4] LEADERSHIP AND INFLUENCE PROCESS Authority is the right to command and extract obedience from others. It comes from organization and it allows the leader to use power. Power is the ability to exercise influence or control over others. In the functioning of a leader the ability to guide the action of others is achieved through his authority. Carrying out of these decisions is accomplished because of the power of the leader. The relationship between the authority and power of a leader as we go further to understand various types of power GROUP DYNAMICS Group Dynamics is concerned with the interactions and forces among group members in a social situation. In the path on management functions, it is important to understand dynamics of members of formal or informal groups in the organization. Group Dynamics is the interaction of forces among group members in a social situation. Authoritarian, Democratic and Laissez-faire, is having three different social situations for the three styles of leadership. In course of time various meanings were attached to the term ‘group dynamics’ One of the meanings suggest how a group should be organized and conducted. In democratic leadership, member participation and overall cooperation are emphasized. Another meaning of Group Dynamics is that it is set of techniques. In various group exercises it tries to make the leader as well as the member effective. An attempt made to make the above members play their roles in a management situation of group discussions, team building, finding out various solutions to problems by brainstorming and understanding ourselves in relation to others while we transact or interact with others. Such exercises are also provided in situations where only members are present and no leader exists to direct or control the group. All these exercises are techniques to develop both the individual as well as the organization in which he or she works. The meaning of the term Group Dynamic suggest internal nature of the groups as to how they are formed, what their structures and processes are and how they function. [7,8] COMPOSITION OF A GROUP In most organizations getting the work done requires group efforts. Thus, a manager must know how to manage individual by knowing the individual dynamics, such as his values. Personality, perceptions and attitudes. A manager must know how to manage a group by understanding Group Dynamics Each group has a common objective, but the members who belong to it may have other personal objectives. For example, a life insurance agent may like to become a member of a parent-teacher association of a school to help promote the development process of its students. But belonging to that association will also help him to increase his or her contact to ensure more and more people, so he gets more commission for as many members as he can sell the insurance to. What is most important in the content of the definition of a group is to be aware of each other in a group. This awareness is seldom there, when we look at an aggregation of people. They are mere collections, different from what we call a group, where members see themselves as belonging to a group in order to interact and achieve the common objectives of the group. Moreover, such kind of interaction may be over a long or a short period of time. [9,10] TYPES OF POWER Legitimate Power This power comes to the leader when the organisation’s authority is accepted. It comes from the rules of the organization. For example, parents, teachers, managers. police, etc. have legitimate power only when their authority is accepted in the positions they hold. Expert Power This is the power of knowledge and skill of special kind that are important in getting the job done. A person’s professional competence or knowledge gives him the expert power. His credibility increases. He can lead other persons to trust his judgments and decisions, as an expert like a physicist or a lawyer or a chemist or a computer programmer or a purchasing agent or a financial analyst. A leader himself may not be an expert in all fields, but he can certainly take the help of experts in particular fields. Charismatic Power This is the power of attraction or devotion, the desire of one person to admire another. A subordinate feels a positive attraction towards a leader by identifying himself with the leader, or gets influenced by the leader’s attractive power. This power helps the subordinate to understand and value the leader so much that he understands and acts according to the expectations of the boss or the leader. It helps him to act as his own boss, and behave in ways he thinks the boss will want. [15] Reward Power This power is the present or potential ability to reward for worthy behaviour. The superior or the leader has the power to give tangible rewards such as promotion, office space, time off from work, attractive work assignments and help to the subordinate. Also psychological rewards like praise, appreciation, approval and recognition can be given by the leader or the superior to the subordinate. The subordinate has to believe that he has access to higher authorities, therefore he can give rewards. This reward power of the leader can also increase the leader’s charismatic and legitimate power. Coercive Power This is the ability to threaten or punish. The leader can give tangible punishments like dismissal, demotion, low rating. less satisfying work assignments, etc. Psychological punishments include criticism, avoidance, disapproval, satirical remarks on the subordinate. The reward power helps to avoid something undesirable. Self-esteem of the subordinate increases because of reward power and decreases because of punishment or coercive power. Even a subordinate may withdraw or break the rules or become hostile. He may not feel attracted towards the charismatic power of the leader and at times may ignore the leader’s legitimate power. Having seen the reasons for differences between the authority and power of the leader, you should know the type of leaders as understood on the basis of their authority and power. [11,12] COLLECTIVE ACTION Interpersonal competence refers to the degree to which we are accurately aware of our impact on others and of the impact of others on us. It is the ability to engage in an mutually helpful relationships. It enables us to achieve your personal goals as well as task goals in the organizations where you we are a member. What are the effects of our interpersonal competence on our managerial behaviour? Interpersonally incompetent managers create an organizational environment in which members act very defensively to protect their own interests. Since everybody acts defensively in the organization. where roles and relationships are basically interdependent, neither the personal goals of the members, nor the task goals can be fully realized. Problems are not confronted and are kept hidden from each other for fear that exploring the problems will only aggravate the situation. In course of time, issues which were avoided and swept under the rug assume gigantic proportions and overwhelm the members. On the other hand, interpersonally competent managers allow their subordinates to challenge their views and to question the organisation’s norms, policies, rules and objectives. When these kinds of behaviour are tolerated, people are likely to discover problems and commit themselves to their solutions. Organizational effectiveness increases. Besides these three types of roles, that may have to interact with a lot of other people from different positions: consumers, suppliers, people from regulatory agencies, general public. etc. Interactions with different interest-groups demand different types of specific skills and competencies. Possession and understanding of these skills may not guarantee successful human relations, but it can increase your interpersonal sensitivity and help you take appropriate action to improve relationships. [13,14]             References Rao, T.V., â€Å"HRD in the New Economic Environment,† Tata McGraw-Hill Book Company, New Delhi,1994 Drucker, P.F. (1974). â€Å"Management Task Responsibilities and Practices†, Harper & Row, New York. Murtin, CC., 2004., Project Management — How to Make It Work, AmaCom, N.Y. Neale RH, 1984., Managing Projects , Geneva Nicholas, J.M., 1990., Managing Business and Engineering Projects Concepts & Implementation, Prentice Hall. N.J. Kharbanda. & Staliworking, EA, 1996.,Successful Projects With a Moral For Managemetn, Gower, England. Hitt, Michael A, (2001), Strategic Management: Competitiveness and globalization, 4th, Thomson Learning. Srivastava, R.M. (1999). Strategic Planning: Formulation Of Corporate Strategy (Texts and Cases) 1st ed., Macmillan Limited. Hamel,G, Collaborate with your Competitors and Win, Harvard Business review,67,1,1989,133-9. Laxmi Narian, Managerial Competition and Motivation in Public Enterprises, Oxford and IBH Publishing Co., New Delhi,1997 Ulrich, D. â€Å"Human Resource Champions†, Harvard Business School Press,2001 Kaplan, R., â€Å"Balance Score Card†, Harvard Business review,2003 Pareek, V., Designing and Managing Human Resource Systems, Oxford & IBH Publishing Co., New Delhi. Pereira D.F., Recent Experiences in Human Resource Development, Oxford& IBH Publishing Co., New Delhi Goldstein, I.L, Training in Organizations: Needs Assessment Development and Evaluation, Wordsworth,2002   

My Favourite Author Essay

â€Å"A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts, they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.† -Roald Dahl Roald Dahl has written numerous children’s books in his career as a writer. He had fun playing around with words, inventing new ones. He always capitalized on his humor, never failing to think to think out of the box. He always wrote from the point of view of a child. Roald Dahl was an acquisitive reader in his younger days. According to him, â€Å"An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details, this (Boy: Tales of Childhood) is not an autobiography† These words brought a smile on my face. I love Dahl’s silly yet creative style of writing. His book ‘Boy: Tales of Childhood’, is a favourite of mine. It is a memoir of Roald’s childhood. I find it utterly fascinating. This autobiography contains incidents about his childhood. He was born in Landaff, Cardiff, Wales, in 1916. He attended The Cathedral School in Llandaff. One of the events in this book is when he was eight. His friend Thwaites among his four friends was spanked by the headmaster for putting a dead mouse in a jar of hard candy, called ‘gobstoppers’ at the local sweet shop, owned by Mrs.Pratchett, an old woman whom Dahl described as â€Å"mean and loathsome†. Roald and the other four boys called the â€Å"Great Mouse Plot of 1924†. Along with his passion for literature, Dahl also developed an interest in photography; it is one of my favourite hobbies too. Roald Dahl was made captain for school fives and squash teams, and he also played football, his exceptional height helped him. In ‘Boy: Tales of Childhood’, Dahl also said that the chocolate company sent over boxes of new chocolates to be tasted. The chocolates were expected to be rated and commented on, be it the flavor or the enhanced needed in those chocolates. Roald wished to earn the praise of Mr. Cadbury himself. This wish of his gave him the inspiration to write the amazing book, ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’. Roald had also said that he originally did not plan to include children in his book at all! But he changed his mind when his nephew said to him, â€Å"Uncle Roald, I do not like it a bit.†Ã‚  Another book, ‘Matilda’ is the second of my favourites of his books. It revolves around Matilda Wormwood, a girl who had an immense love for reading. Matilda, because of her parents’ ignorance towards her, taught herself to do things like cooking and reading. Her parents considered her a nuisance, who, according to them, should’ve been watching more television and reading fewer books! To add up to this, Matilda’s headmistress, a horribly cruel woman, Miss Trunchbull who believed Matilda’s father’s words indicating that his daughter-Matilda- was not well-behaved. Matilda later discovers magical powers within herself, powers that, with practice, allowed her to levitate things, with just a glance in its direction and a little concentration. This book is about how Matilda teaches her parents and headmistress a lesson, and makes friends with Miss Honey in the process. I have observed that Roald Dahl’s books for children, quite typically, comprise of evildoers who hate little children. These wicked people are either simply villains or tremendous gluttons. These characters or stories can also be a metaphor for the abuse the older boys put him through. His books also usually contain dark humor. These wicked people are usually punished for their evil, wicked deeds. Some of Roald Dahl’s other well known children’s books are, The BFG, The Twits, The Witches, Fantastic Mr. Fox, James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Dahl joined the RAF (Royal Air Force) as an aircraftsman. He married actress Patricia Neal fourteen years later after his involvement in wars, and they had five children. Roald Dahl died in 1990 of leukemia. Though Roald Dahl is no longer in this world, the magical worlds created by him in his wonderful, or, in his words- phizz-whizzing!-books, and characters will always live on. Roald Dahl will always be my favourite author.

Critical aspects of closing probate deals

Chapter 11Making the Offer. Once you have contacted the executor, you must hold an action program of what needs to be done and how. This is one of the critical facets of shutting probate trades. You have to do an offer that will give you a fine-looking return and ideally this must be the lowest possible offer. Some executors are unfastened to a low monetary value from the beginning. Some executors are unrealistic and tend to believe that the belongings is deserving much more than the FMV and when you encounter such a state of affairs, you need to make a just outlook puting with the householder. Give him grounds, show him the logic and explicate to him why his belongings value is lesser than what he expects.Stairss TO FOLLOW WHILE NEGOTIATINGHere are a few stairss that will assist you negociate a trade with the executor rapidly and swimmingly. As you would make for any meeting, you need to fix for your meeting with the executor excessively. Compile and reexamine your research and other notes. Carry these along for easy mention during your meeting with the executor. Ensure that you are cognizant of the FMV of the belongings you are traveling to negociate for. It besides helps to hold the comparables ready to hand merely in instance you need to demo it to the executor to warrant your monetary value. Have a pen and paper to take notes on your review of the belongings. Transport a torch which comes in ready to hand while inspecting topographic points where the sunshine does non make. Some probate houses might hold the electricity supply switched off. You should do a torch and a clean contract lasting fixtures within your auto. Bing prepared will give your run intoing a professional touch and the executor will recognize that you are here with a serious purpose of purchasing the belongings, non to blow his clip.STEP TWOOnce you are at the belongings, inform the executor that you would wish to transport out a thorough review of the belongings. Inquire with him if he would be interested in following you on the review circuit. It is a good thought to hold the executor by your side when you start with your review. About all executors are incognizant of the different fix occupations that will necessitate to be done. This is an advantage for you because as you progress with your review, you will be pulling his attending to the many fix occupations the house needs therefore take downing his outlooks with every defect you point out. Merely for mention, inquire the executor his estimation of the cost for acquiring these betterments done. Most executors are incognizant of the fix costs although they may hold limited cognition of woodworking and other minor hole up occupations. You ‘ll be cheerily surprised as many householders will state you an estimation that is higher than yours. If you are accosted with a belongings in hapless status and are unable to gauge the fix costs involved, you can ever mention it to a contractor or a place inspector before you purchase it. If the estimation provided by them is higher than yours, you have the option of endorsing out of the contract without any legal complications. I will discourse this in greater inside informations in the undermentioned chapter. Never forget, the executor wants to dispose this belongings at the earliest to cast a burden off his shoulder. He would be more than happy to offer you a stone underside monetary value if you point out that the house needs a batch of fixs. Refrain from throwing an offer at the executor boulder clay you have completed your Refrain from throwing an offer at the executor boulder clay you have completed your review. Most executors will non near this topic boulder clay you are prepared to inform them. If an executor tries to brawl an offer, inform him that before you extend an offer, you would necessitate to inspect the belongings to convey it to marketable status. It is a good thought to hold the executor by your side when you start with your review. Do n't trust on your memory. It is a good thought to observing things down on a piece of paper. Take plentifulness of cryptic notes. Make the semblance for the householder that a batch of things are non right by doing voluminous notes. In a probate belongings, since the householders have non maintained the belongings good, there will be enough of things you will happen when inspecting the belongings. You can take to do notes on the fix occupations needed in each room. Inspect the full house, and every clip you see an expensive occupation that needs to be done reference that tactfully to the executor. By making this, you are allowing the executor know that you will hold to pass a good sum of money in priming the house and this will accordingly take down the executors outlook of a high monetary value. Note down of import points of all such countries as you proceed with your review. Ninety per centum of probate houses need decorative and kitchen fixs. Normally I ever make it a point to state the executor that in add-on to all the fix occupations, at the really minimal, the kitchen and bathrooms will hold to remake, the house needs a pigment occupation and the rug has to be changed before the belongings can be listed for a sale. These things, although the executor thinks are really expensive, can be completed for a minor cost. After you ‘ve listed down and told the executor about the basic betterments that are needed, you will hold to gauge, a moderately high figure, of the cost for acquiring these occupations completed. It is a good thought to round off estimations to the highest five 1000 dollar grade. For illustration, if I estimate a belongings needs fix occupations deserving twelve thousand dollars, I will round it up to fifteen thousand dollars. Merely for mention, inquire the executor his estimation of the cost for acquiring these betterments done. You ‘ll be cheerily surprised as many executors will state you an estimation that is higher than yours. If this be the instance, you should instantly hold to the executors generous estimation. On the other manus, many executors will state you they have no thought and will bank on you to give them an estimation. Once you ‘ve told them your hyperbolic sum, they will hold however because your attack has portrayed you as an experient investor. With this done, you ‘ve got the executor into believing about all the betterments needed to acquire the belongings into premier status. All these old ages, he might non hold noticed these uneven terminals and now will be believing about the money needed to hold the fix work completed. This will automatically take down his outlooks of the value of the belongings and he would be willing to settle for your offer. You are now ready to near the following measure.STEP THREEMost executors I know do n't truly do a full graduated table effort in researching the just market value of the probate house. They might merely name the existent estate agent one time or mention to the revenue enhancement assessed value of the house. You ‘ll be surprised to observe how frequently you come across such state of affairss. This nevertheless, is a distinguishable advantage for you. Get an estimation of the just market value of the belongings from the executor. If the sum is lower than the just market value, accept it. On the other manus, if his estimation is higher than the just market value, you must put the right outlooks. Inform him that the belongings could hold been tantamount to its just market value were it in premier status. Show him the research you have carried out with your existent estate agent and the comparables that point to the fact that the just market value is so lower than what his estimation is. Be polite and at the same clip drive your point across. To turn out your point, you could demo him the comparables that were sold late. Showing comparables is frequently a trade determiner and most executors will accept your offer based on the comparables. Refrain from doing extra remarks on the value of the belongings unless the executor approaches the topic. Let him recognize that his belongings ‘s value is lower than his outlooks.STEP FOURNow is the clip to state the executor that you are an investor. As an investor, your purpose is to purchase the belongings, titivate it up and so sell it every bit rapidly as possible. As you have told him that you are an investor, the executor knows that you will be selling the belongings for a net income. By making this you are subtly inquiring him to see giving you a antic price reduction on the belongings. After this, you are ready to continue to the following measure.STEP FIVEEqually far as possible, chorus from doing the offer foremost unless perfectly necessary. If you can pull out an offer from the executor, it may good be possible that he will offer you a monetary value that is lower than yours. Inquire how much money he needs for the belongings. Never ask him what he wants – wants and demands are different. Keep back for his response. Till now, he knows that the just market value is much lesser than his estimation plus the fact that a just sum of fix work has to be done to acquire the belongings to marketable status. Above all this, he is besides cognizant that you need to do a net income from this trade. His reply might merely surprise you, and cheerily so! If the executor is unable to judge the just monetary value, this is the right clip to put your offer. Make non travel rapidly into doing an offer. Take your clip, contemplate the cost constituents we learnt in chapter 10, calculate the possible net income and so widen your offer. If you are unable to make that instantly, inform the executor that you will necessitate twenty four hours to reexamine your notes and the fix costs before you can do an offer. When you have arrived at a figure, give it directly to the executor. Inform him that after a thorough reappraisal of the Numberss, you will be paying ten dollars for the probate belongings. Once your offer is out, give the executor some clip to contemplate upon your offer. It is non unusual for several yearss to go through by before you receive a response from the executor. All you can make till the clip you hear from the executor is be patient and delay.WHAT IF THE EXECUTOR PROPOSES A COUNTER OfferMost of the times you will happen the executor has accepted your offer and is willing to subscribe a contract with you. In the following chapter I will learn you to outline existent estate contracts that safeguard your involvements. However, how do you undertake a state of affairs where an executor proposes a counter offer. It is non unusual for a counter offer to be proposed and you must be prepared for such an contingency. In this state of affairs, inquire from the executor as to what monetary value is he comfy with. If his demand seems sensible, you may wish to raise your offer incrementally. Remember ne'er to transcend 65 % of the just market value of the belongings. If the belongings requires major fixs in add-on to merely picture and rug, you should subtract these costs from the value arrived at by ciphering 65 % of the just market value pf the belongings.WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU ARE N'T ABLE TO NEGOTIATE A CHEAP PRICEIf you ‘ve reached this phase, there is a just opportunity that you will set down yourself a antic trade. For whatever grounds, the executor and you have non been able to hold upon the lowest reciprocally acceptable monetary value, thank the executor and travel on to the following moneymaking chance. Should this occur, inform him to reach you if he is non able to sell the belongings in the hereafter. This gives him an unfastened door for him to make you and it works as most executors tend to name back after they have thought about your offer. Many times you will come within striking distance of shuting a trade but when you ca n't look to acquire a low monetary value, be prepared to drop the trade. Never pay more than what a belongings is deserving. There are plentifulness of good trades to bag. Knowing when an how to walk off is a important portion of puting and this gives you the ability to cover from a place of strength. Acerate leaf to state, this should be done as smoothly and tactfully as possible. Remember, when you let travel of one trade, there is ever another great trade you can happen.

The Orion Shield Project Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

The Orion Shield Project - Essay Example This also shows how getting appointed for an unsuitable position can lead to disputes and confusions both for the employee and for the organization as a whole. From the ethical point of view Gary was correct on his part but if we consider the case from the business viewpoint then it can be said that on certain aspects Gary was wrong. The case focuses on a number of aspects of an organization and exhibits the outcomes providing the reader a food for thought towards finding out paths to better results. In the following sections we will discuss about the various aspects related to the case. Technical aspect Henry Larsen, the director of engineering at SEC appointed one of his most trusted employees, Gary Allison, as the project manager for the Orion Shield project. Soon Gary realized that the design prepared by their firm was unable to meet the technical specifications. He informed Larsen that the customers are looking for a design that would operate successfully and normally within -65 degree F to 145 degree F. He tried and tested several other approaches but failed. Then he suggested that the customers should be informed about this issue. ... He thought it would be unethical to conceal the fact from the customers which can possibly give rise to mistrust and dissatisfaction among the customers later on. But he was rebuked for this ethical thought. Larsen clearly told him that if he wished to move on with this project with an ethical viewpoint then he would have easily selected some ethical manager and not Gary. Since he needed someone who can tactfully handle such situations without getting ethically influenced therefore he chose Gary for this project and he wants Gary to act as per his instructions. Also Gary stated in the financial report about the progress of the project and the cost allocated. He represented all the facts truthfully. However his endeavor was totally discouraged by Elliot Grey who informed him that his truthfulness has caused a huge loss to the company as Grey had asked for $3, 00,000 additional amounts from the headquarters by some manipulation so that Gary could get rescued from the complex situation. Now this amount would be restricted to only $ 150,000. Legal aspect Gary got informed by Larsen that a new material JXB3 has proved to be suitable for satisfying all the specifications mentioned in the contract. This material had been tested for the past two weeks by Larsen and Paula and now they have come to the conclusion that it is the perfect one. Larsen also told that all these testing had been done with the money paid for the deal and it is against the contract to use the amount for some other purpose and the revelation of this fact might lead to cancellation of the contract. Also it was illegal on SEC’s part to develop a new material and introduce it within the

Criticism on the Metamorphosis and analyze on Metamorphosis - Kafka Research Proposal

Criticism on the Metamorphosis and analyze on Metamorphosis - Kafka - Research Proposal Example Yet, Kafka’s message is deeper. He seems not to desire Gregor’s salvation from death, but his death from the society should serve as salvation. Gregor’s condition may seem similar to the condition of those dying from mortal diseases. The very beginning of the story indicates to such a point of view. â€Å"One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin†. It is easy to imagine a person who once learns an awful diagnosis of his and informs his family of it. As he wakes up in the morning he finds out that his family’s attitude to him has changed entirely. Now Gregor is not able to earn his old parents and small sister’s living, and this is the only question which really troubles him. However, his family is frightened and feels disgust. His parents do not even want to hear of him or see him. Only his younger sister, whose head is full of romantic images, â€Å"sacrifices† herself caring of her sick brother. However, Grete stops perceiving her elder brother as a human being. She is squeamish about touching his personal thi ngs and hurries to the window to open it and air the room, as if it is filled with poison. Grete avoids looking at her brother and doesn’t address him. Gregor’s mother faints at Gregor’s sight. Gregor’s father feels such disgust that even injures his son â€Å"protecting† himself from the sick. Mr. Samsa doesn’t allow Gregor to leave the room. The whole family perceives Gregor’s condition as shame. At first the family tries not to treat Gregor as an enemy, while â€Å"family duty required the suppression of disgust and the exercise of patience, nothing but patience†. However, after the three gentlemen deny paying rent on the pretence of having shared the apartment with such a monster, even Grete bursts out, exclaiming – â€Å"We must try to get rid of it!†, – and Mrs. Samsa entirely

Marketing and Marketing Strategy Coursework Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

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Late Ming and Qing Period painting - Essay Example The essay "Late Ming and Qing Period painting" analyzes the painting of the late Ming and Ging period. In the analysis and comparison of late Ming and Qing painting traditions, it is important to understand that both traditions were influenced by preceding cultural, socioeconomic and political events. The late Ming period embraced many artistic traditions and branches that originated in the early Ming period, namely scholar painters at the Hongwu court (1368-1398), the the professionals at the Xuande (1426-1436), and Chenghua courts (1436-1465) (Lin, 1967). However, from the critical perspective, Wumen School has been the most influential artistic school for the formation of late Ming period distinctive painting style. Although this school emerged in the middle Ming period, it has had profound long-lasting effect on Chinese painting tradition that extended not only to late Ming period, but had significant manifestation in Qing painting period (Lin, 1967). Historically, despite great variety in numbers and geographic locations, the artistic schools of late Ming can be limited to a few most distinctive ones, namely Xu Wei School, Don Qichang School, Huating School, Zhao Zuo, Susong School, and Chen chun School. Walter Benjamin has argued that the Art for Art’s Sake movement in the later half of the nineteenth century was a reaction to the commercialization of culture and the possible threats it posed to the elite’s exclusive claim to art. The commercialisation and popularisation of art apparently.

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Egoism related to ethics - Essay Example Nevertheless, egoism in ethics becomes mismatched statement; as the core idea of ethical ideology is to act in a moral way (right or wrong) to benefit community or the larger world. Yet, egoism perspective teaches only to act in one’s own self interest. Thus, completeness in truth is not a provable moral principle in egoism. Simultaneously, rational egoism in ethics is described as a significant choice or interest of a person with rational or logical action plan to attain personal interest. However, in general egoism is seen with disdain, but that is not the case always. It benefits a person and community as well. For instance, if a person belief in re-use of things then he is not only saving money at his end, but also decreasing pollution factor in various manners. Similarly, cultural relativism is a perspective of a specific group to act as morally right or wrong. Hence, this perceptive neither forms a theory or is ethically justified. ‘Basant’ is a sub-continental festival celebrated by people of India and Pakistan. Its main idea perceived by general public is to celebrate spring via yellow dress codes, kite flying and eating. However, this festival is not appreciated by Muslims due to religious grounds as it is celebrated in the honour of Hindu Goddess Saraswati. There is no harm if one politely declines to eat pork, raw ribs or alcohol due to personal belief or religious grounds. As it is an acceptable action according to egoism and ethics. Yet, if a person belief and adapts a practice, which exploits the rights of larger community then egoism is a false

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Principles of Macroeconomics Essay An increase of government purchases occurs after a rise in aggregate output and employment. This tends to stimulate the economy, people then tend to buy more and save less. Therefore, it results to a higher importation than exportation, known as the trade deficit. The budget deficit increases the external deficits because the exports do not proportionately increase to counterweight increase imports. This explains that a large budget deficit raises domestic interest rates and the exchange rate. With a higher exchange rate the domestic products becomes more expensive and foreign goods cheaper. Hence, the import increases while export decreases. Resulting, the trade deficit to be enlarged. Consequently, to help drive the trade and current account of the balance of payments into deficit there is a combination of a higher interest rate and a stronger currency. However, to defend that the budget deficits mainly results from tax cuts that tend to reduce both public revenues and public saving; many researchers have justified the Ricardian equivalence hypothesis. Nevertheless, these tax cuts are effective on reducing public savings and enlarging the budget deficit, equivalently they increase private saving by amount. However, Ricardo’s neutrality hypothesis recommended that the private sector views budget deficits as public investment and treats public and private investment as perfect substitutes. How do the CPI and the GDP deflator differ? Why do economists believe that the CPI overstates the rate of inflation? Is this an important problem? CPI is an accurate measure of inflation. When the price basket goes up so does the CPI. It is limited to what it measures. It only measure the prices of the goods and services purchased by the urban consumers which is about 60% of the total production of the economy whilst on the contrary the GDP deflator measures the total production in the economy. It also allows to show up in the deflator the as people respond to changing prices. With this approach, the GDP deflator is being rebound up to date expenditure patterns. Despite that CPI only measure about 60% of the total production, it helps people give the idea how it affects them because it measures the type of goods they buy. Moreover, it comes out monthly and available anytime. With the historical comparison, most of the time the CPI and GDP price deflator had the same inflation rate, and when there is a difference, they do not differ much. However, if the CPI differs from the GDP deflator, it is only by a fraction of a percentage point, even so this could be important for some economic policy decision. Many economists believe that CPI overstates the rate inflation because they think that CPI is not a good indicator of a current inflation. According to David Ranson, a U. S. economist, a better indicator of current inflation would be increases in the price of commodities because initially inflation affects commodity prices and it will probably take several years for this commodity inflation to work its way through an economy and be reflected in the CPI. It is not an important problem so long as one is using whichever measure is appropriate for their findings. Reference Quantcrunch Tutor (April 2009 ) QA in Macroeconomics http://qainmacroeconomics. blogspot. com/2009_04_01_archive. html

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Analysis of Contemporary British Preaching Styles

Analysis of Contemporary British Preaching Styles The concept of preaching Chapter Two Contextual Literature Review 2.1 Establishing a starting point. Sermons are not a kind of discourse given much serious public attention in twenty-first century Britain. The very concept of preaching often brings with it negative connotations. To accuse any contemporary commentator of preaching is to suggest that unsubstantiated opinions are being delivered in a tedious manner. That in such common usage preaching is almost invariably a highly critical or even condemnatory epithet indicates something of the social standing of the practice of preaching. Preaching is not an activity that is generally thought of as either intellectually or emotionally engaging. It is, rather, something that is considered to be at best passà ©, and at worst wholly untrustworthy. If challenged, those who speak of preaching in such pejorative terms will often cite the cultural distance in practice and understanding between contemporary society and the sermon form as the basis of their judgment. Mention will be made of the social irrelevance of the content of typical sermons, the perceived authoritarian position of the preacher, and the strangeness of the environment in which sermons usually occur. It is also likely that the methodology employed will be judged anachronistic, static, long-winded, and overly didactic for people used to the methods and time-frames of electronic media. The implication is that preaching is somehow out of place in modern society and that, therefore, the negative attitudes displayed in the colloquial use of the term preaching is something new. It is fashionably contemporary to adopt a contemptuous or at best a jocular attitude towards preaching. I use the term fashionably to emphasize that preaching is not the only discourse to receiv e such widespread opprobrium: advertising is similarly widely scorned yet, given the vast sums of money spent on it, is evidently effective nonetheless (Kilbourne, 1999: 34). Voiced contempt of preaching as a worthwhile actively is not necessarily to be taken at face value. As has been stated in the introduction, this thesis seeks to present an analysis of contemporary British preaching as a practice of social mnemonics. As the idea of social practice in that terminology refers to the whole of society rather than an interest group or a few like-minded people gathered together, such a perspective may appear to be an oxymoron given that recent poling suggests only just over six per cent of the adult population of the UK are churchgoers (see Brierley, 2008). This literature review will, nevertheless, seek to establish that Christian preachers who have reflected in depth on their practice in recent generations have invariably assumed that homiletics is an aspect of public discourse rather than an institutionally confined and specialized type of communication. In recent times, justifying that assumption has become more and more difficult, as this review will demonstrate. It has to be admitted that preaching no longer has the place in society-wide awareness i t once enjoyed, despite the occasional headline making exceptions, such as Archbishop Robert Runcies sermon at the Falklands War Memorial Service on 26th June 1982 that reportedly so annoyed the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher (Brown, 2000). Despite the decline in preachings social status, this study argues that there are always connections between homiletic theory and wider social discourse, and that discovering those connections is a mnemonic skill required of all preachers. That many studies (for example, Ford. (1979); Bausch, (1996); and Day, Astley and Francis, (2005)) have observed that since at least the 1960s the idea of preaching as a worthwhile arena of social discourse has been repeatedly and vigorously questioned is part of the contextualization with which this thesis is concerned. That the very word preaching brings with it negative connotations that touch even regular Christian worshippers, as N.T. Wright observes in his foreword to the Reader on Preaching (Day, 2005: ix), is part of the social understanding this study aims to examine. The colloquial usage that applies the word preaching to the expression of any unsubstantiated opinions, or any speech delivered in a tedious manner, is not a prejudice that serious homiletic theory can simply ignore. That usage is widespread and is, for example, represented in the 1995 edition of the Oxford English Reference Dictionary where the second definition of preach is give moral advice in an obtrusive w ay. Similarly, the use of the word preaching as a highly critical or even condemnatory epithet is too frequent in newspapers to need much supporting elaboration. Andrew Rawnsley writing in The Observer on 13th July 2008 is but one example of a continuing journalistic convention. Rawnsley cited the drawbacks for politicians who preach in their campaigning via a long catalogue of negatives about the idea of preaching which included delivering patronising lectures from a position of immense privilege, wringing their hands about the sins of the world without offering any practical answers to improve society, and simplified to the point of parody. These kinds of associations related to the idea of preaching cannot be simply dismissed if it is to be argued that the practice of preaching within the churches is closely related to wider social trends. Instead, the contemporary bias that associates preaching with that which is intellectually lazy, emotionally sterile, untrustworthy, or simply passà ©, must be treated as a factor that needs to be addressed in considering the mechanisms of collective memory. That said, it must also be acknowledged that the assertion that preachings low social esteem is a modern phenomenon is not wholly true. Like the contemporary negative connotations of preaching, the characterization of preaching as formerly being held in great social esteem, is a generalization that obscures as much as it discloses. In the famous passage concerning preaching in Anthony Trollopes novel Barchester Towers the negativity usually judged as modern is apparent even at the so-called high-point of Victorian religious practice. Written between April 1855 and November 1856, Trollopes words contain the same kind of criticisms and sense of hostility encountered colloquially nowadays. He wrote: There is, perhaps, no greater hardship at present inflicted on mankind in civilized and free countries, than the necessity of listening to sermons. No one but a preaching clergyman has, in these realms, the power of compelling an audience to sit silent, and be tormented. No one but a preaching clergyman can revel in platitudes, truisms, and untruisms, and yet receive, as his undisputed privilege, the same respectful demeanour as though words of impassioned eloquence, or persuasive logic, fell from his lips. No one can rid himself of the preaching clergyman. He is the bore of the age, the old man whom we Sinbads cannot shake off, the nightmare that disturbs our Sundays rest, the incubus that overloads our religion and makes Gods service distasteful. We are not forced into church! No: but we desire more than that. We desire not to be forced to stay away. We desire, nay, we are resolute, to enjoy the comfort of public worship; but we desire also that we may do so without an amount of tedium which ordinary human nature cannot endure with patience; that we may be able to leave the house of God, without that anxious longing for escape, which is the common consequence of common sermons. (Trollope, 1995: 43-44) Only the assumption that Sunday worship is the norm and the invariable gender of the preacher signifies Trollopes diatribe as of another age. The notion of a static audience enduring a platitudinous and boring verbal presentation has an altogether familiar ring about it. As Colin Morris (1996: xi) points out, it is significant that the first series of the Lyman-Beecher Lectures on Preaching established at Yale University in the 1870s ended with a lecture entitled, Is Preaching Finished? Needless to say, the lecture firmly declared that preaching had a future; but, put alongside Trollopes criticisms, it demonstrates that negativity about sermons predates the age of mass electronic communication. In recent years, numerous influential homileticians have described preaching as being in crisis (for example, Jensen, (1993); Wilson, (1988); Morris, (1996)), but too often such worried analysis has overstated the contemporaneity of the problem. 2.2 The perception of a crisis in preaching. Three recurring emphases are common to the arguments of those who see the crisis in preaching as something of recent origin, namely: a widespread loss of confidence in institutions; a change in socially learnt communicative skills; and the all-pervasive influence of television and associated vehicles of mass communication. So, to amplify those three aspects, the argument is usually made in the following kinds of terms. First, not only has the severe decline in commitment to religious institutions in recent times resulted in far fewer people actually hearing sermons, even those who do experience preaching at firsthand are much less likely to treat sermons as being particularly significant than did their immediate forebears. Scepticism, and a questioning outlook that constantly raises issues of credibility, is part of the very air of social intercourse, and preaching has no social independence from such an atmosphere. Like every other voice, the preaching voice is one voice amongst a myriad of other voices, and is just as harried by questions of authenticity, doubt and competition as any other voice. Contemporary European society, it is said, has a fundamentally anti-authoritarian aspect to it that will not allow any single voice ultimate authority. Preaching, therefore, which is usually considered to require special and very particular authority being attributed to the preacher, is especially suspec t. This, in turn, has ramifications for those who preach, since as individuals they are just as much influenced by these contextual pressures as anyone else. This means that preachers, whatever they claim in public, almost inevitably have less confidence in the preaching task than even their recent predecessors. Second, in what the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo (2001: 230) has termed a society of generalized communication, the very nature of communication itself has profoundly shifted. It is as if everything in human experience has become an object of communication. This shift is often associated with consumerism because, it is argued, such a process of ever widening objects of communication allows more and more events, things, and relationships to become marketable commodities. This expansion, however, brings with it three difficult consequences: it vastly increases the number and range of communication events each person encounters day by day, with a resulting loss in focus, concentration, and time spent on each one; it so stimulates the psychological and physical experience of each person that peoples boredom thresholds have decreased dramatically; and it makes communication itself part of the constantly changing, consumption dominated, arena of style and fashion. These things are pa rticularly problematic for preaching since they mean hearers have ever shortening attention spans, feel they need to be stimulated by what they hear, and employ fashion-like judgments to both their readiness to listen and their willingness to respond (Rogness, 1994: 27-29). Coupled with these changes comes an emphasis on technique in communication, and a preference for labelling unacceptable ideas or challenges as a failure in communication. As a result preachers face intense pressures to conform, both in terms of the content of sermons and the techniques of presentation, to what is socially acceptable simply to gain a hearing. Accordingly, it is argued that the requirement to attract attention and engagement is of a wholly more onerous intensity than it ever was in past times. In the distracted age that is contemporary society the static commitment and attention required of sermon audiences is so counter-cultural as to be almost unachievable. Third, the argument gives prominence to the absolute dominance of television as the popular medium, and characterizes contemporary culture as televisual and post-literate. It is said that through television, for the first time in the history of humanity, children are being socialized into image use prior to word use (see Warren, 1997). Consequently, the use of words is likely to no longer occupy the pole position in social discourse, but rather to occupy an inherently second order, commentary position. In other words, our culture has shifted from a reading-formed preference towards the ear over the eye, to an image-formed favouring of the eye over the ear, with an obviously detrimental effect on a word dominated form like preaching. Television also appears to be an open and democratized form of communication that offers the prospect of an absolutely free flow of information. It tantalizes with the notion that anything that happens will be almost instantaneously communicable; an impre ssion further reinforced by the Internet. Of course there are serious criticisms to be made of these judgments, but they are nevertheless widely persuasive, at least at face value, both because of the sensory immediacy of the medium and because of the entertainment factors closely allied with it. In comparison preaching seems a highly subjectivized personal choice in which the preacher demands of an audience assent without prior consent and justification, and in which the factor of entertainment does not figure at all. In a televisual world of a seemingly infinite number of stories, preachings insistence, as it is perceived, on the one story of Gods relationship with humanity in Jesus Christ seems partial and even tedious. Those who lived before the development of electronic media lived lives in which stories, colour, and pictures were rare and precious events; people of the televisual age inhabit a world alive with an ever changing array of images, colours and narratives. Is it any wonder then that preaching that developed as a communication technique in that pre-television world is thought of as having become outmoded? Such are the usual parameters of the argument—broadly stated, no doubt, and perhaps caricatured a little—of recent scholarly analysis of the social location of the practice of preaching in contemporary European society. Interestingly, it is apparent that the scholarly commentary not only echoes colloquial opinion about the recentness of the relative decline of the authority afforded preaching, but also the reasons given for that decline. One of questions which this thesis seeks to address is whether such judgments adequately represent what is actually going on in the act of preaching, and whether by an all too easy assumption of preaching as an essentially distinctive activity somehow distanced from other forms of discourse such analysis does not fall prey to the very forces it is trying to counter. After the hiatus caused by World War II, the BBC resumed television broadcasting in 1946, and the commencement of broadcasting by commercial stations in 1955 accelerated the use of the medium. By 1958 the number of British households with a TV exceeded those with only a radio (Mathias, 2006). Given the above discussion of the widely perceived influence of new electronic media and TVs escalating use, the 1950s seem an appropriate starting point for the consideration of publications dealing with preaching. Quite apart from this more commonplace sense of a shift having taking place, scholarly analysis of both Church history and homiletics tends to support the idea that very significant changes relevant to the thesis topic did in fact occur at this period. Those changes were not necessarily recognized at the time; perhaps an indication of the lag that occurs as the memories of one generation gives way to those of a succeeding one. One British preacher, however, was alert to the possibili ty that something profound was happening. That preacher was a R. E. C. Charlie Browne, a Manchester vicar, whose 1950s reflections on the preaching task turned out to be amazingly prescient of things that would become major concerns years later. Browne serves as a marker of change. It is sensible, therefore, to examine Browne in some detail before returning to the more general overview. 2.3 R. E. C. Browne as a marker of the changing social location of preaching. R.E.C. Brownes The Ministry of the Word was first published in 1958 in a series of short works entitled Studies in Ministry and Worship under the overall editorship of Professor Geoffrey Lampe. Lampes editorship lent theological credibility to a series that was notable on two counts. First, it was decidedly ecumenical (for example, two of the studies were by Max Thurian, who later became internationally known as the theological expositor of the ecumenical Taizà © community); and second, it was written from a perspective that only later would be widely termed applied or practical theology. Brownes book is the acknowledged masterpiece of the series and has been reissued three times since its first publication (1976, 1984 and 1994), as well as being published in the United States in 1982. Writing in 1986, Bishop Richard Hanson said of it: This is no little volume of helpful hints about preaching but a profound study of the meaning and use of language in relation to theology and to faith, and one that will outlast all the ephemeral booklets about how to preach. (in Corbett, 1986: v) Just why this work has been so frequently referred to in a wide variety of Christian traditions will be considered later, but for the purposes of the present discussion the crucial point is the historical context of its writing and publication. Browne wrote the book whilst he was Rector of the parish of Saint Chrysostum, Victoria Park, Manchester in the 1950s. Ronald Preston, in a foreword to one edition of The Ministry of the Word, describes Victoria Park as having moved rapidly since the 1920s from the remains of enclosed and privileged nineteenth-century affluence to near disintegration (in Browne, 1976: 10). He notes also, however, that the St Chrysostums relative proximity to the university and the citys main teaching hospital made it a base from which Brownes influence spread widely. Hanson records that it was a parish where the personality and abilities alone of the incumbent cleric could attract worshippers (Corbett, 1986: iv). In other words, several aspects of the social world that historians like Hastings (1986), Welsby (1984), and Hylson-Smith (1998) have characterized as typical of the 1950s were clearly likely to have been there in Brownes experience of the ministerial life. For example, Welsby commenting on t he monthly journal Theology in the two immediately post-war decades notes how it was widely read by parish clergy and acted as a connecting bridge between the concerns of academia and local church life, and concludes: It is significant, however, that fundamental matters, such as belief in God or in Christ were seldom discussed in its pages, as though these theological foundations were secure and might be taken for granted. This could be a symbol of much of the theology of the forties and fifties. There was a self-confidence and security so that even those who did write about God, Christology, of the Church did so as though the basis of belief was unquestionably right. (Welsby, 1984: 67) Elsewhere in the same book Welsby notes that the seeds of radical change were present in the 1950s but went unperceived, and he describes the atmosphere in the Church of England as one of complacency and an apparent unawareness of trends already present which were to burst to the surface in the sixties (1984: 94). Browne most certainly did not share that unawareness and frankly acknowledged the difficulties of communicating the gospel despite the relatively secure social position of theological thought and institutional belief. Far from being in an unassailable authoritative position, he described preachers as living and preaching in an age when there is general perplexity and bewilderment about authority, and as all too unwittingly signifying that perplexity in the language and thought expressed in the pulpit (Browne, 1976: 33). Browne would probably have concurred with Adrian Hastings opinion that in the ebb and flow of the intellectual tide in the twentieth century, the 1950s marked a high water point of sympathy for the Christian faith in contrast to the high point for secularism immediately after World War I (Hastings, 1986: 491), but he nevertheless argued that effective preaching required new symbols because new human knowledge has disabled the old ones (Browne, 1976: 107). Hastings, looking back on the times in which Browne wrote, asserts: There was never a time since the middle of the nineteenth century when Christian faith was either taken so seriously by the generality of the more intelligent or could make such a good case for itself. (Hastings, 1986: 491) Browne himself is rather more querulous in his reflections and quotes approvingly from Emmanuel Mounier: There is a comfortable atheism, as there is a comfortable Christianity. They meet on the same swampy ground, and their collisions are the ruder for their awareness and irritable resentment of the weakening of their profound differences beneath the common kinship of their habits. The prospect of personal annihilation no more disturbs the contented sleep of the average radical-socialist than does horror of the divine transcendence or terror of reprobation disturb the spiritual digestion of the habituà ©s of the midday Mass. Forgetfulness of these truisms is the reason why so many discussions are still hampered by naà ¯ve susceptibilities. Emmanuel Mounier, The Spoil of the Violent, Harvill Press, 1955: 25 (as cited in Browne, 1976: 109) Browne was conscious that amongst the comforts of wide social acknowledgement and respect other more challenging forces were becoming apparent. Browne is wary of any intellectual triumphalism on the part of preachers and insists that in attempting to address the atheist, or the wholly religiously indifferent unperturbed post-atheist, it is always necessary to establish pastoral rapport first (1976: 110). Sometimes, he admits, such rapport will be impossible to establish (1976: 110). Paradoxically, as Hastings notes (1986: 492, 496), the 1950s were at one and the same time an era in which religion was considered seriously by a number of the great cultural and intellectual figures of the day (such as Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957), Carl Jung (1875-1961), Graham Sutherland (1903-80), Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), to name just a few) and in which the radical agnosticism and secularism born of earlier times also flourished (for examples see the works of A.J. Ayer (1910-89), C.P. Snow (1905-80), A.J.P. Taylor (1906-90) and Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914-2003)). Perhaps it was that Browne realized i n a way other preachers did not, that although these two worlds of thought existed side by side the competition between them was not in any way equal. As Hylson-Smith observes, by the end of World War II the environmental context of all cultural activity was essentially secular (1998: 212). That point was a matter of essential concern to a preacher like Browne who regarded sermons as an artistic activity requiring similar processes of social understanding and interaction as those necessary to the production of music, poetry or painting (Browne, 1976: 18). Browne writes rather ruefully: Christians have the naà ¯ve idea that the arts, specially drama, could and should be extensively used for the proclamation of the gospel. In the first place Christian artists cannot easily and quickly find a way of expressing Christian doctrine in a community which is not moved by Christian symbols. Indeed at present there is no common symbolism Christian or otherwise and Christian artists are found incomprehensible and disturbing by their fellow Christians who cannot justify the authority of new forms and somehow feel that old forms might be patched and brought up-to-date. In the second place whenever the church tries to use art as a method of propaganda her integrity and authority are severely questioned by just those whose conversion would be most significant. (1976: 35) There is here an early recognition of that social forgetfulness of Christian symbols that would a generation later become a commonplace assessment of religious traditions in contemporary Britain. For Browne the preachers purpose was to seek answers about the most profound aspects of human concern and experience with the single-mindedness and commitment of an honest artist. Easy answers to difficult questions, or formulaic responses to deep questioning, were to Browne a betrayal of preachings very purpose. For him nothing less than the artists earnest wrestling to express the inexpressible was good enough. It is hard to imagine that Browne was untroubled that the things of artistic expression, with one or two notable exceptions, seemed less and less concerned with religious ideas, and that the churches appeared indifferent to the fact (Hylson-Smith, 1998: 212). As favourable to inherited ideas of religious expression as the climate of the 1950s appears viewed from the beginning of the twenty-first century, Browne, as a preacher active during those years, offers an altogether less sanguine appraisal. That his book dwells extensively on the issue of meaning and the use of language in relationship to the expression of faith indicates that he did not share the easy certainties regarding the communication of religious ideas that were still prevalent within the institutional church of his day. Brownes commitment to preaching as a necessary part of Christian community life is absolute, but his insistence that its practice is most like the creation of a work of art or a poem makes plain its inherent limitations: the sermon can no more readily define the truth in absolute terms than can the artist or poet (1976: 18). Such an insistence shifts the authority given to preaching from one of power, described as six foot above contradiction, to the altoge ther different position implied in later years by terms such as Fords communicative expertise which is self-authenticating (Ford, 1979: 235), or Taylors fragile words (Taylor, 1998: 121). Like such later homileticians, Browne believed preachers should not claim too much for their efforts. That reserve, however, should not be mistaken for a hesitation about the necessity or value of preaching. In his work there is no hint of the thought of later theorists who sought to abandon preaching completely. Brownes reserve is a perceptive awareness that, to use the terminology of Adrian Hastings, although the comfortably traditionalist church of his times was undergoing a period of confident revival (1986: 504) it was in fact finding it harder and harder to connect with the generality of people in terms of shared symbols and meanings. Browne was ahead of his time in his recognition that the changing social context of ministry had direct ramifications for the power and authority of the preacher. He wrote: What ministers of the Word say may seem too little to live on, but they must not go beyond their authority in a mistaken attempt to make their authority strong and clear. That going beyond is always the outcome of an atheistic anxiety, or a sign that the man of God has succumbed to the temptation to speak as a god, to come in his own name and to be his own authority. (Browne, 1976: 40) Such sentiments are echoed in the more recent application of contemporary philosophy to preaching by the American scholar John S. McClure (2001). Nevertheless, in terms of homiletic theory in Britain in the twentieth-century, Brownes was a voice that offered a new appreciation of the actual communicative environment in which sermons were placed. His book demonstrates that the radical calling into question of the methodologies of preaching pre-dates both the crisis noted by such commentators as Ford (1979) or Jensen (1993) and the colloquial assumption that in the 1950s, before the widespread use of television, the place of the sermon was assured. This concern about preachings power to engage attention indicates that the shifts that will be analysed when this study returns to the consideration of collective memory must extend wide enough to include responses such as those of Browne. The unease with homiletic methodology that Brownes work expressed provides a justification for this review using his analysis as its historical starting point. Consequently, there now follows an overview of trends in preaching since Brownes book that aims to provide both general orientation and a framework within which works discussed later can be placed. 2.4 Trends in the theory and practice of preaching since the mid 1950s. O.C. Edwards in his A History of Preaching notes that the 25 year period ending in 1955 turned out to be the high-point of the social standing and influence of traditional Protestant churches (2004: 665). Whilst that judgment may seem too effusive and unqualified when applied to the United Kingdom, it does, nevertheless, indicate the reality of the institutional confidence that was prevalent in churches on both sides of the Atlantic at the time. That confidence had direct ramifications for preaching: as Hastings puts it, in the immediate post-war years preaching as both art and edifying was still alive and cherished (1986: 462). The comment comes in a passage in A History of English Christianity 1920 1985 (1986: 436-472) that deals with the Free Churches, in which Hastings cites the influential preaching ministries of Leslie Weatherhead (1893-1975), W.E. Sangster (1900-1960), and Donald Soper (1903-1998)—all of whom drew large numbers to hear them preach. In the same section of his book, however, comes this stark conclusion: The mid-1950s can be dated pretty precisely as the end of the age of preaching: people suddenly ceased to think it worthwhile listening to a special preacher. Whether this was caused by the religious shift produced by the liturgical movement or by the spread of television or by some other alteration in human sensibility is not clear. But the change is clear. (1986: 465) Hastings is perhaps a little too hesitant in his judgement about what prompted this change. Although numerous theological and social factors were obviously significant, the turn towards television as a predominating pastime must surely have been the crucial prompter of change in the way people spent their time. That preaching, at the beginning of the 1950s at least, remained dominated by agendas and styles drawn from previous generations is evident in the fact that a number of books from those earlier times remained in frequent use. Bishop Phillips Brooks had delivered his eight lectures on preaching at Yale Divinity School in the Lyman Beecher Lectureship of January and February 1877, but his advice was still considered pertinent enough to warrant the publication of a British fifth edition in 1957. Similarly, Harry Emerson Fosdicks Lyman Beecher lectures of the winter of 1923-4, entitled The Modern Use of the Bible, were last re-issued in their published form as late as 1961; and Leslie Weatherheads Lyman Beecher lectures of 1948-9, although only published in part in his book Psychology, Religion and Healing in 1957, was re-issued in 1974. Two crucial points are suggested by the longevity of these works: first, although the 1950s do indeed mark a watershed in preachings social location, it is clear that the consequences of that change were not apparent with the same force, nor at the same rate, Analysis of Contemporary British Preaching Styles Analysis of Contemporary British Preaching Styles The concept of preaching Chapter Two Contextual Literature Review 2.1 Establishing a starting point. Sermons are not a kind of discourse given much serious public attention in twenty-first century Britain. The very concept of preaching often brings with it negative connotations. To accuse any contemporary commentator of preaching is to suggest that unsubstantiated opinions are being delivered in a tedious manner. That in such common usage preaching is almost invariably a highly critical or even condemnatory epithet indicates something of the social standing of the practice of preaching. Preaching is not an activity that is generally thought of as either intellectually or emotionally engaging. It is, rather, something that is considered to be at best passà ©, and at worst wholly untrustworthy. If challenged, those who speak of preaching in such pejorative terms will often cite the cultural distance in practice and understanding between contemporary society and the sermon form as the basis of their judgment. Mention will be made of the social irrelevance of the content of typical sermons, the perceived authoritarian position of the preacher, and the strangeness of the environment in which sermons usually occur. It is also likely that the methodology employed will be judged anachronistic, static, long-winded, and overly didactic for people used to the methods and time-frames of electronic media. The implication is that preaching is somehow out of place in modern society and that, therefore, the negative attitudes displayed in the colloquial use of the term preaching is something new. It is fashionably contemporary to adopt a contemptuous or at best a jocular attitude towards preaching. I use the term fashionably to emphasize that preaching is not the only discourse to receiv e such widespread opprobrium: advertising is similarly widely scorned yet, given the vast sums of money spent on it, is evidently effective nonetheless (Kilbourne, 1999: 34). Voiced contempt of preaching as a worthwhile actively is not necessarily to be taken at face value. As has been stated in the introduction, this thesis seeks to present an analysis of contemporary British preaching as a practice of social mnemonics. As the idea of social practice in that terminology refers to the whole of society rather than an interest group or a few like-minded people gathered together, such a perspective may appear to be an oxymoron given that recent poling suggests only just over six per cent of the adult population of the UK are churchgoers (see Brierley, 2008). This literature review will, nevertheless, seek to establish that Christian preachers who have reflected in depth on their practice in recent generations have invariably assumed that homiletics is an aspect of public discourse rather than an institutionally confined and specialized type of communication. In recent times, justifying that assumption has become more and more difficult, as this review will demonstrate. It has to be admitted that preaching no longer has the place in society-wide awareness i t once enjoyed, despite the occasional headline making exceptions, such as Archbishop Robert Runcies sermon at the Falklands War Memorial Service on 26th June 1982 that reportedly so annoyed the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher (Brown, 2000). Despite the decline in preachings social status, this study argues that there are always connections between homiletic theory and wider social discourse, and that discovering those connections is a mnemonic skill required of all preachers. That many studies (for example, Ford. (1979); Bausch, (1996); and Day, Astley and Francis, (2005)) have observed that since at least the 1960s the idea of preaching as a worthwhile arena of social discourse has been repeatedly and vigorously questioned is part of the contextualization with which this thesis is concerned. That the very word preaching brings with it negative connotations that touch even regular Christian worshippers, as N.T. Wright observes in his foreword to the Reader on Preaching (Day, 2005: ix), is part of the social understanding this study aims to examine. The colloquial usage that applies the word preaching to the expression of any unsubstantiated opinions, or any speech delivered in a tedious manner, is not a prejudice that serious homiletic theory can simply ignore. That usage is widespread and is, for example, represented in the 1995 edition of the Oxford English Reference Dictionary where the second definition of preach is give moral advice in an obtrusive w ay. Similarly, the use of the word preaching as a highly critical or even condemnatory epithet is too frequent in newspapers to need much supporting elaboration. Andrew Rawnsley writing in The Observer on 13th July 2008 is but one example of a continuing journalistic convention. Rawnsley cited the drawbacks for politicians who preach in their campaigning via a long catalogue of negatives about the idea of preaching which included delivering patronising lectures from a position of immense privilege, wringing their hands about the sins of the world without offering any practical answers to improve society, and simplified to the point of parody. These kinds of associations related to the idea of preaching cannot be simply dismissed if it is to be argued that the practice of preaching within the churches is closely related to wider social trends. Instead, the contemporary bias that associates preaching with that which is intellectually lazy, emotionally sterile, untrustworthy, or simply passà ©, must be treated as a factor that needs to be addressed in considering the mechanisms of collective memory. That said, it must also be acknowledged that the assertion that preachings low social esteem is a modern phenomenon is not wholly true. Like the contemporary negative connotations of preaching, the characterization of preaching as formerly being held in great social esteem, is a generalization that obscures as much as it discloses. In the famous passage concerning preaching in Anthony Trollopes novel Barchester Towers the negativity usually judged as modern is apparent even at the so-called high-point of Victorian religious practice. Written between April 1855 and November 1856, Trollopes words contain the same kind of criticisms and sense of hostility encountered colloquially nowadays. He wrote: There is, perhaps, no greater hardship at present inflicted on mankind in civilized and free countries, than the necessity of listening to sermons. No one but a preaching clergyman has, in these realms, the power of compelling an audience to sit silent, and be tormented. No one but a preaching clergyman can revel in platitudes, truisms, and untruisms, and yet receive, as his undisputed privilege, the same respectful demeanour as though words of impassioned eloquence, or persuasive logic, fell from his lips. No one can rid himself of the preaching clergyman. He is the bore of the age, the old man whom we Sinbads cannot shake off, the nightmare that disturbs our Sundays rest, the incubus that overloads our religion and makes Gods service distasteful. We are not forced into church! No: but we desire more than that. We desire not to be forced to stay away. We desire, nay, we are resolute, to enjoy the comfort of public worship; but we desire also that we may do so without an amount of tedium which ordinary human nature cannot endure with patience; that we may be able to leave the house of God, without that anxious longing for escape, which is the common consequence of common sermons. (Trollope, 1995: 43-44) Only the assumption that Sunday worship is the norm and the invariable gender of the preacher signifies Trollopes diatribe as of another age. The notion of a static audience enduring a platitudinous and boring verbal presentation has an altogether familiar ring about it. As Colin Morris (1996: xi) points out, it is significant that the first series of the Lyman-Beecher Lectures on Preaching established at Yale University in the 1870s ended with a lecture entitled, Is Preaching Finished? Needless to say, the lecture firmly declared that preaching had a future; but, put alongside Trollopes criticisms, it demonstrates that negativity about sermons predates the age of mass electronic communication. In recent years, numerous influential homileticians have described preaching as being in crisis (for example, Jensen, (1993); Wilson, (1988); Morris, (1996)), but too often such worried analysis has overstated the contemporaneity of the problem. 2.2 The perception of a crisis in preaching. Three recurring emphases are common to the arguments of those who see the crisis in preaching as something of recent origin, namely: a widespread loss of confidence in institutions; a change in socially learnt communicative skills; and the all-pervasive influence of television and associated vehicles of mass communication. So, to amplify those three aspects, the argument is usually made in the following kinds of terms. First, not only has the severe decline in commitment to religious institutions in recent times resulted in far fewer people actually hearing sermons, even those who do experience preaching at firsthand are much less likely to treat sermons as being particularly significant than did their immediate forebears. Scepticism, and a questioning outlook that constantly raises issues of credibility, is part of the very air of social intercourse, and preaching has no social independence from such an atmosphere. Like every other voice, the preaching voice is one voice amongst a myriad of other voices, and is just as harried by questions of authenticity, doubt and competition as any other voice. Contemporary European society, it is said, has a fundamentally anti-authoritarian aspect to it that will not allow any single voice ultimate authority. Preaching, therefore, which is usually considered to require special and very particular authority being attributed to the preacher, is especially suspec t. This, in turn, has ramifications for those who preach, since as individuals they are just as much influenced by these contextual pressures as anyone else. This means that preachers, whatever they claim in public, almost inevitably have less confidence in the preaching task than even their recent predecessors. Second, in what the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo (2001: 230) has termed a society of generalized communication, the very nature of communication itself has profoundly shifted. It is as if everything in human experience has become an object of communication. This shift is often associated with consumerism because, it is argued, such a process of ever widening objects of communication allows more and more events, things, and relationships to become marketable commodities. This expansion, however, brings with it three difficult consequences: it vastly increases the number and range of communication events each person encounters day by day, with a resulting loss in focus, concentration, and time spent on each one; it so stimulates the psychological and physical experience of each person that peoples boredom thresholds have decreased dramatically; and it makes communication itself part of the constantly changing, consumption dominated, arena of style and fashion. These things are pa rticularly problematic for preaching since they mean hearers have ever shortening attention spans, feel they need to be stimulated by what they hear, and employ fashion-like judgments to both their readiness to listen and their willingness to respond (Rogness, 1994: 27-29). Coupled with these changes comes an emphasis on technique in communication, and a preference for labelling unacceptable ideas or challenges as a failure in communication. As a result preachers face intense pressures to conform, both in terms of the content of sermons and the techniques of presentation, to what is socially acceptable simply to gain a hearing. Accordingly, it is argued that the requirement to attract attention and engagement is of a wholly more onerous intensity than it ever was in past times. In the distracted age that is contemporary society the static commitment and attention required of sermon audiences is so counter-cultural as to be almost unachievable. Third, the argument gives prominence to the absolute dominance of television as the popular medium, and characterizes contemporary culture as televisual and post-literate. It is said that through television, for the first time in the history of humanity, children are being socialized into image use prior to word use (see Warren, 1997). Consequently, the use of words is likely to no longer occupy the pole position in social discourse, but rather to occupy an inherently second order, commentary position. In other words, our culture has shifted from a reading-formed preference towards the ear over the eye, to an image-formed favouring of the eye over the ear, with an obviously detrimental effect on a word dominated form like preaching. Television also appears to be an open and democratized form of communication that offers the prospect of an absolutely free flow of information. It tantalizes with the notion that anything that happens will be almost instantaneously communicable; an impre ssion further reinforced by the Internet. Of course there are serious criticisms to be made of these judgments, but they are nevertheless widely persuasive, at least at face value, both because of the sensory immediacy of the medium and because of the entertainment factors closely allied with it. In comparison preaching seems a highly subjectivized personal choice in which the preacher demands of an audience assent without prior consent and justification, and in which the factor of entertainment does not figure at all. In a televisual world of a seemingly infinite number of stories, preachings insistence, as it is perceived, on the one story of Gods relationship with humanity in Jesus Christ seems partial and even tedious. Those who lived before the development of electronic media lived lives in which stories, colour, and pictures were rare and precious events; people of the televisual age inhabit a world alive with an ever changing array of images, colours and narratives. Is it any wonder then that preaching that developed as a communication technique in that pre-television world is thought of as having become outmoded? Such are the usual parameters of the argument—broadly stated, no doubt, and perhaps caricatured a little—of recent scholarly analysis of the social location of the practice of preaching in contemporary European society. Interestingly, it is apparent that the scholarly commentary not only echoes colloquial opinion about the recentness of the relative decline of the authority afforded preaching, but also the reasons given for that decline. One of questions which this thesis seeks to address is whether such judgments adequately represent what is actually going on in the act of preaching, and whether by an all too easy assumption of preaching as an essentially distinctive activity somehow distanced from other forms of discourse such analysis does not fall prey to the very forces it is trying to counter. After the hiatus caused by World War II, the BBC resumed television broadcasting in 1946, and the commencement of broadcasting by commercial stations in 1955 accelerated the use of the medium. By 1958 the number of British households with a TV exceeded those with only a radio (Mathias, 2006). Given the above discussion of the widely perceived influence of new electronic media and TVs escalating use, the 1950s seem an appropriate starting point for the consideration of publications dealing with preaching. Quite apart from this more commonplace sense of a shift having taking place, scholarly analysis of both Church history and homiletics tends to support the idea that very significant changes relevant to the thesis topic did in fact occur at this period. Those changes were not necessarily recognized at the time; perhaps an indication of the lag that occurs as the memories of one generation gives way to those of a succeeding one. One British preacher, however, was alert to the possibili ty that something profound was happening. That preacher was a R. E. C. Charlie Browne, a Manchester vicar, whose 1950s reflections on the preaching task turned out to be amazingly prescient of things that would become major concerns years later. Browne serves as a marker of change. It is sensible, therefore, to examine Browne in some detail before returning to the more general overview. 2.3 R. E. C. Browne as a marker of the changing social location of preaching. R.E.C. Brownes The Ministry of the Word was first published in 1958 in a series of short works entitled Studies in Ministry and Worship under the overall editorship of Professor Geoffrey Lampe. Lampes editorship lent theological credibility to a series that was notable on two counts. First, it was decidedly ecumenical (for example, two of the studies were by Max Thurian, who later became internationally known as the theological expositor of the ecumenical Taizà © community); and second, it was written from a perspective that only later would be widely termed applied or practical theology. Brownes book is the acknowledged masterpiece of the series and has been reissued three times since its first publication (1976, 1984 and 1994), as well as being published in the United States in 1982. Writing in 1986, Bishop Richard Hanson said of it: This is no little volume of helpful hints about preaching but a profound study of the meaning and use of language in relation to theology and to faith, and one that will outlast all the ephemeral booklets about how to preach. (in Corbett, 1986: v) Just why this work has been so frequently referred to in a wide variety of Christian traditions will be considered later, but for the purposes of the present discussion the crucial point is the historical context of its writing and publication. Browne wrote the book whilst he was Rector of the parish of Saint Chrysostum, Victoria Park, Manchester in the 1950s. Ronald Preston, in a foreword to one edition of The Ministry of the Word, describes Victoria Park as having moved rapidly since the 1920s from the remains of enclosed and privileged nineteenth-century affluence to near disintegration (in Browne, 1976: 10). He notes also, however, that the St Chrysostums relative proximity to the university and the citys main teaching hospital made it a base from which Brownes influence spread widely. Hanson records that it was a parish where the personality and abilities alone of the incumbent cleric could attract worshippers (Corbett, 1986: iv). In other words, several aspects of the social world that historians like Hastings (1986), Welsby (1984), and Hylson-Smith (1998) have characterized as typical of the 1950s were clearly likely to have been there in Brownes experience of the ministerial life. For example, Welsby commenting on t he monthly journal Theology in the two immediately post-war decades notes how it was widely read by parish clergy and acted as a connecting bridge between the concerns of academia and local church life, and concludes: It is significant, however, that fundamental matters, such as belief in God or in Christ were seldom discussed in its pages, as though these theological foundations were secure and might be taken for granted. This could be a symbol of much of the theology of the forties and fifties. There was a self-confidence and security so that even those who did write about God, Christology, of the Church did so as though the basis of belief was unquestionably right. (Welsby, 1984: 67) Elsewhere in the same book Welsby notes that the seeds of radical change were present in the 1950s but went unperceived, and he describes the atmosphere in the Church of England as one of complacency and an apparent unawareness of trends already present which were to burst to the surface in the sixties (1984: 94). Browne most certainly did not share that unawareness and frankly acknowledged the difficulties of communicating the gospel despite the relatively secure social position of theological thought and institutional belief. Far from being in an unassailable authoritative position, he described preachers as living and preaching in an age when there is general perplexity and bewilderment about authority, and as all too unwittingly signifying that perplexity in the language and thought expressed in the pulpit (Browne, 1976: 33). Browne would probably have concurred with Adrian Hastings opinion that in the ebb and flow of the intellectual tide in the twentieth century, the 1950s marked a high water point of sympathy for the Christian faith in contrast to the high point for secularism immediately after World War I (Hastings, 1986: 491), but he nevertheless argued that effective preaching required new symbols because new human knowledge has disabled the old ones (Browne, 1976: 107). Hastings, looking back on the times in which Browne wrote, asserts: There was never a time since the middle of the nineteenth century when Christian faith was either taken so seriously by the generality of the more intelligent or could make such a good case for itself. (Hastings, 1986: 491) Browne himself is rather more querulous in his reflections and quotes approvingly from Emmanuel Mounier: There is a comfortable atheism, as there is a comfortable Christianity. They meet on the same swampy ground, and their collisions are the ruder for their awareness and irritable resentment of the weakening of their profound differences beneath the common kinship of their habits. The prospect of personal annihilation no more disturbs the contented sleep of the average radical-socialist than does horror of the divine transcendence or terror of reprobation disturb the spiritual digestion of the habituà ©s of the midday Mass. Forgetfulness of these truisms is the reason why so many discussions are still hampered by naà ¯ve susceptibilities. Emmanuel Mounier, The Spoil of the Violent, Harvill Press, 1955: 25 (as cited in Browne, 1976: 109) Browne was conscious that amongst the comforts of wide social acknowledgement and respect other more challenging forces were becoming apparent. Browne is wary of any intellectual triumphalism on the part of preachers and insists that in attempting to address the atheist, or the wholly religiously indifferent unperturbed post-atheist, it is always necessary to establish pastoral rapport first (1976: 110). Sometimes, he admits, such rapport will be impossible to establish (1976: 110). Paradoxically, as Hastings notes (1986: 492, 496), the 1950s were at one and the same time an era in which religion was considered seriously by a number of the great cultural and intellectual figures of the day (such as Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957), Carl Jung (1875-1961), Graham Sutherland (1903-80), Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), to name just a few) and in which the radical agnosticism and secularism born of earlier times also flourished (for examples see the works of A.J. Ayer (1910-89), C.P. Snow (1905-80), A.J.P. Taylor (1906-90) and Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914-2003)). Perhaps it was that Browne realized i n a way other preachers did not, that although these two worlds of thought existed side by side the competition between them was not in any way equal. As Hylson-Smith observes, by the end of World War II the environmental context of all cultural activity was essentially secular (1998: 212). That point was a matter of essential concern to a preacher like Browne who regarded sermons as an artistic activity requiring similar processes of social understanding and interaction as those necessary to the production of music, poetry or painting (Browne, 1976: 18). Browne writes rather ruefully: Christians have the naà ¯ve idea that the arts, specially drama, could and should be extensively used for the proclamation of the gospel. In the first place Christian artists cannot easily and quickly find a way of expressing Christian doctrine in a community which is not moved by Christian symbols. Indeed at present there is no common symbolism Christian or otherwise and Christian artists are found incomprehensible and disturbing by their fellow Christians who cannot justify the authority of new forms and somehow feel that old forms might be patched and brought up-to-date. In the second place whenever the church tries to use art as a method of propaganda her integrity and authority are severely questioned by just those whose conversion would be most significant. (1976: 35) There is here an early recognition of that social forgetfulness of Christian symbols that would a generation later become a commonplace assessment of religious traditions in contemporary Britain. For Browne the preachers purpose was to seek answers about the most profound aspects of human concern and experience with the single-mindedness and commitment of an honest artist. Easy answers to difficult questions, or formulaic responses to deep questioning, were to Browne a betrayal of preachings very purpose. For him nothing less than the artists earnest wrestling to express the inexpressible was good enough. It is hard to imagine that Browne was untroubled that the things of artistic expression, with one or two notable exceptions, seemed less and less concerned with religious ideas, and that the churches appeared indifferent to the fact (Hylson-Smith, 1998: 212). As favourable to inherited ideas of religious expression as the climate of the 1950s appears viewed from the beginning of the twenty-first century, Browne, as a preacher active during those years, offers an altogether less sanguine appraisal. That his book dwells extensively on the issue of meaning and the use of language in relationship to the expression of faith indicates that he did not share the easy certainties regarding the communication of religious ideas that were still prevalent within the institutional church of his day. Brownes commitment to preaching as a necessary part of Christian community life is absolute, but his insistence that its practice is most like the creation of a work of art or a poem makes plain its inherent limitations: the sermon can no more readily define the truth in absolute terms than can the artist or poet (1976: 18). Such an insistence shifts the authority given to preaching from one of power, described as six foot above contradiction, to the altoge ther different position implied in later years by terms such as Fords communicative expertise which is self-authenticating (Ford, 1979: 235), or Taylors fragile words (Taylor, 1998: 121). Like such later homileticians, Browne believed preachers should not claim too much for their efforts. That reserve, however, should not be mistaken for a hesitation about the necessity or value of preaching. In his work there is no hint of the thought of later theorists who sought to abandon preaching completely. Brownes reserve is a perceptive awareness that, to use the terminology of Adrian Hastings, although the comfortably traditionalist church of his times was undergoing a period of confident revival (1986: 504) it was in fact finding it harder and harder to connect with the generality of people in terms of shared symbols and meanings. Browne was ahead of his time in his recognition that the changing social context of ministry had direct ramifications for the power and authority of the preacher. He wrote: What ministers of the Word say may seem too little to live on, but they must not go beyond their authority in a mistaken attempt to make their authority strong and clear. That going beyond is always the outcome of an atheistic anxiety, or a sign that the man of God has succumbed to the temptation to speak as a god, to come in his own name and to be his own authority. (Browne, 1976: 40) Such sentiments are echoed in the more recent application of contemporary philosophy to preaching by the American scholar John S. McClure (2001). Nevertheless, in terms of homiletic theory in Britain in the twentieth-century, Brownes was a voice that offered a new appreciation of the actual communicative environment in which sermons were placed. His book demonstrates that the radical calling into question of the methodologies of preaching pre-dates both the crisis noted by such commentators as Ford (1979) or Jensen (1993) and the colloquial assumption that in the 1950s, before the widespread use of television, the place of the sermon was assured. This concern about preachings power to engage attention indicates that the shifts that will be analysed when this study returns to the consideration of collective memory must extend wide enough to include responses such as those of Browne. The unease with homiletic methodology that Brownes work expressed provides a justification for this review using his analysis as its historical starting point. Consequently, there now follows an overview of trends in preaching since Brownes book that aims to provide both general orientation and a framework within which works discussed later can be placed. 2.4 Trends in the theory and practice of preaching since the mid 1950s. O.C. Edwards in his A History of Preaching notes that the 25 year period ending in 1955 turned out to be the high-point of the social standing and influence of traditional Protestant churches (2004: 665). Whilst that judgment may seem too effusive and unqualified when applied to the United Kingdom, it does, nevertheless, indicate the reality of the institutional confidence that was prevalent in churches on both sides of the Atlantic at the time. That confidence had direct ramifications for preaching: as Hastings puts it, in the immediate post-war years preaching as both art and edifying was still alive and cherished (1986: 462). The comment comes in a passage in A History of English Christianity 1920 1985 (1986: 436-472) that deals with the Free Churches, in which Hastings cites the influential preaching ministries of Leslie Weatherhead (1893-1975), W.E. Sangster (1900-1960), and Donald Soper (1903-1998)—all of whom drew large numbers to hear them preach. In the same section of his book, however, comes this stark conclusion: The mid-1950s can be dated pretty precisely as the end of the age of preaching: people suddenly ceased to think it worthwhile listening to a special preacher. Whether this was caused by the religious shift produced by the liturgical movement or by the spread of television or by some other alteration in human sensibility is not clear. But the change is clear. (1986: 465) Hastings is perhaps a little too hesitant in his judgement about what prompted this change. Although numerous theological and social factors were obviously significant, the turn towards television as a predominating pastime must surely have been the crucial prompter of change in the way people spent their time. That preaching, at the beginning of the 1950s at least, remained dominated by agendas and styles drawn from previous generations is evident in the fact that a number of books from those earlier times remained in frequent use. Bishop Phillips Brooks had delivered his eight lectures on preaching at Yale Divinity School in the Lyman Beecher Lectureship of January and February 1877, but his advice was still considered pertinent enough to warrant the publication of a British fifth edition in 1957. Similarly, Harry Emerson Fosdicks Lyman Beecher lectures of the winter of 1923-4, entitled The Modern Use of the Bible, were last re-issued in their published form as late as 1961; and Leslie Weatherheads Lyman Beecher lectures of 1948-9, although only published in part in his book Psychology, Religion and Healing in 1957, was re-issued in 1974. Two crucial points are suggested by the longevity of these works: first, although the 1950s do indeed mark a watershed in preachings social location, it is clear that the consequences of that change were not apparent with the same force, nor at the same rate,