Category Archives: Tolerance

FREE TO BUILD BRIDGES

Occasionally one of my children suggests that we go to Chick-fil-A for lunch after church. Oops. Not one of the over 1,600 restaurant locations are open on Sunday. The founder, Truett Cathy, incorporated this practice as one of the chain’s values when he opened the first store in 1967 in Atlanta.

As a devout Christian, Cathy implemented other biblical principles to guide his operation of the restaurant. Those principles are applied throughout the chain as part of its corporate culture. Those who work for the company discover an environment of support and encouragement for the employee and respect and service for the customer that eludes many corporations today. Continue reading

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PERSPECTIVE

How much of life do we live this way? Our limited perspective rushes to judgment. Our dogmatism disguises itself as wisdom. Our egotism masquerades as enlightenment. At least, this is the way it seems to work in my life.

Perspective is everything (well, almost everything). We have to realize that each of us is situated in time and space. Our education overlaps on a venn diagram, but our assumptions and opinions are shaped by so much more than mere education – heritage, neighborhood, generation, ethnicity, parental training (with each parent also situated), siblings (also situated differently from you), peers, extended family, experiences, religion, and the list goes on. Continue reading

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SOMETHING BETTER THAN TOLERANCE

Digging deeper, Gregory notes that “tolerance doesn’t necessarily mean understanding. Adults working with teens say they see an unsettling strain of desensitivity among young people.” According to studies, college students are 40 percent less empathic than they were thirty years ago. Many factors might be contributing to this growing hardness, including violent video games, technological social networking and the ruthless content of television, especially in reality shows. Continue reading

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