Sep

2019

Leadership conference lacks leadership

It was billed as the biggest, most important, leadership conference ever held in this area -- the Level Up Executive Leadership Conference -- 10 hours with eight great leaders -- yesterday.

If you bought tickets ranging in price up to $1600, plus tax, you got to hear about leadership from two former prime ministers of Canada: Jean Chretien and Stephen Harper.

The term “former” applies to several other speakers too.

Darren Hardy is the former publisher /editor of Success Magazine.

Walter Bond is a former star in the National Basketball Association.

Omar Johnson is the former CEO of Beats by Dre, the premium headphone company.

Lane Merrifield is the former owner of Penguin Club, sold to Disney for $350 million.

I tried to think back to Jean Chretien’s years as prime minister. Only two things spring to mind -- his attempt to strangle a man who objected his policies, and his long-standing feud with Paul Martin that split the Liberal Party and led to its humiliation in the 2011 federal election.

If that’s leadership, count me out.

I remember much more about Stephen Harper’s leadership.

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Categories: Sharp Edges

Tags: leadership, Jean Chretien, Stephen Harper, Greta Thunberg

25

Sep

2019

I still don’t know what worship is

Author: Jim Taylor

You’ve probably heard someone say, “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.” They might apply the saying to music, cars, or cooking. Maybe you’ve even said it yourself.

Lately, I’ve been saying it about worship.

I’ve probably had more experience of worship than most lay people. Since I was a child, I’ve attended worship services pretty much every week.

As a journalist writing about religion, I’ve attended worship in Africa, India, and South America – places where I understood not a single word said or sung. I’ve worshipped in big churches and small churches, in affluent churches and struggling churches, in churches with long-term clergy and in churches with no professional leadership at all.

I’ve shared the Eucharist with 5,000 at a World Council of Churches Assembly. And I’ve sat with six strangers on wooden benches in a converted garage where a lay preacher harangued me about hell and the woman next to me sounded as if she might be having an orgasm.

I’ve heard a lot of sermons. Some were brilliant. Others — to quote my friend Ralph Milton — “barely dribbled over the edge of the pulpit before expiring on the floor.”

But worship is more than a sermon.

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Categories: Soft Edges

Tags: worship, sermon, WCC

22

Sep

2019

On the wrong side of a watershed

Author: Jim Taylor

My granddaughter is black. She’s in Grade 10, in a comfortable, friendly little city with a population of around 40,000 -- almost entirely white.

My granddaughter is discovering racism. She’s the only black person in her class. Some of her classmates -- one boy in particular -- call her “nigger.” They make fun of her. She feels excluded.

She says she desperately wants to move to Vancouver. Or Los Angeles. Or even Atlanta. Where she won’t stand out, be different, where there are more black people and she can blend in.

She doesn’t realize that blending in -- especially in Los Angeles or Atlanta -- might be more hazardous than standing out in Canada. Blending in might mean getting pulled over, interrogated, searched and manhandled, for the crime of being black while driving. She might be denied educational opportunities, or shut out of job opportunities. At worst, she might be a target for a white-supremacist’s bullets.

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Categories: Sharp Edges

Tags: watersheds, racism, schools

17

Sep

2019

flipped images

Author: Jim Taylor

I don’t write poems in a flush of enthusiasm. I start writing because there’s something in my gut that I want to express, but I don’t know how. So I write, and I set aside, and some day months along I come back to those inarticulate gropings and see something in them, and start rewriting, amending, polishing.

This is one of those long-buried beginnings, resurrected.

flipped images

my printer went to sleep

it dozes off, when it’s not

making black marks on white paper

it has to keep itself busy

when it’s not, it turns its neurons off

grabs a nap, goes dormant

puts its digital processes on hold

to save energy

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Categories: Poetry

Tags: negative images, printers, computer processes

16

Sep

2019

Water should be treated as sacred

Author: Jim Taylor

I stepped out the front door of the theatre last Saturday night just as the first drops of rain fell. The drops felt as big as marbles.

I ran for my car.

Then the rain came pounding down. Too much, too fast, for windshield wipers to keep up.

Driving home, I counted the gaps between flashes of lightning. Three to five seconds. Once, I got to ten seconds before the next flash.

Water coursed down the gutters. Tree branches, bent under the weight of water running off their leaves, thrashed in gusts of wind.

And I was not in the Bahamas. Where Hurricane Dorian had wreaked utter havoc earlier that week.

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Categories: Sharp Edges

Tags: water, Hurricanes, oceans

Jim Taylor's Columns - 'Soft Edges' and 'Sharp Edges'

Leadership conference lacks leadership

I still don’t know what worship is

On the wrong side of a watershed

flipped images

flipped images

Water should be treated as sacred

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