Selected Articles on Transformation and Religious Life
Over the years, I have written a number of articles on transformation, leadership, religious life, discernment, grief, community, and the difficult grace of institutional change.
Some of these pieces were written for particular moments in religious life. Others still speak to the questions many communities are carrying now.
This is a selected archive. I will refer to these articles from time to time in Reflections from the Crossroads, and I offer them here for those who wish to go deeper. These selections represent themes that have shaped my work over the past several decades and continue to inform the conversations emerging through Graced Crossroads.
Transformation and Religious Life
A reflection on how communities can gather their hard-won wisdom and allow it to become the seedbed for a new and more life-giving future.
A practical exploration of the choices available to religious communities as they face diminishment, transition, and the invitation to imagine new forms of life.
A reflection on why real transformation begins with a shift in consciousness, not merely with new plans, structures, or strategies.
A call to understand refounding not as nostalgia for the past, but as a courageous re-engagement with charism for the sake of the future.
A reflection on how communities can interpret loss, change, and uncertainty in ways that deepen hope rather than simply manage decline.
A reflection on what younger members reveal about vocation, belonging, change, and the unfinished work of transformation in religious life.
A seasonal reflection on waiting, surrender, and the ancient spiritual path beneath the visible work of change.
Communal Discernment and Elections
Elections and Communal Discernment:
Goals, Myths and Gifts
A reflection on how elections can become more than a governance procedure when communities approach them as a deeper act of communal discernment.
Where Two or More are Gathered
A reflection on the grace and difficulty of discerning together when real differences, hopes, fears, and histories are all in the room.
Circular Models of Leadership
A reflection on leadership models that move beyond hierarchy and invite broader participation, mutual responsibility, and shared wisdom.
Triangulation and Resistance
Triangulation and the Misuse of Power:
A Dance of Villains, Victims and Rescuers
A reflection on how anxious systems create triangles, assign roles, and misuse power when communities avoid direct and honest engagement.
Don't Resist Resistance:
Embracing Resistance as the Hard Work of Change
A reflection on resistance as a necessary source of information, energy, and truth in any serious process of transformation.