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Faith and History: Reflections on the Work of the ASCH

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Barbara Brown Zikmund
Barbara Brown Zikmund
Affiliation:
president and professor of American religious history at Hartford Seminary, Hartford, Connecticut
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Extract

Robert Greenleaf, in his classic book Servant Leadership, makes the argument that in earlier eras it was possible to make a difference in society as an individual. He writes, “Whereas, until recently, caring was largely person to person, now most of it is mediated through institutions—often large, complex, powerful, impersonal, not always competent, sometimes corrupt [institutions]. If a better society is to be built, one that is more just and more loving, one that provides greater creative opportunity for its people, then the most open course is to raise both the capacity to serve and the very performance as servant of existing major institutions by new regenerative forces operating within them.” He goes on to make the case that “trustees” have a key role in creating and maintaining what he calls “servant institutions.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 66 , Issue 2 , June 1997 , pp. 284 - 302
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1997

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References

This essay was presented as the presidential address to the American Society of Church History, 4 January 1997.

1. Greenleaf, Robert, Servant Leadership (New York, 1977), p. 49.Google Scholar

2. Bledstein, Burton J., The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education (New York, 1976), p. 79.Google Scholar

3. Ibid., pp. 80–86.

4. Ibid., pp. 86–87.

5. Ibid., p. 92.

6. Ibid., p. 105.

7. From the Papers of the American Society of Church History I (1889), pp. v–viii, quoted in Lotz, David, “Philip Schaff and the Idea of Church History,” in Bowden, Henry W., ed., A Century of Church History: The Legacy of Philip Schaff (Carbondale, Ill., 1988), pp. 1–35.Google Scholar

8. Lotz, pp. 9–12.

9. See “Catholic Historiography,” chapter 3 in Bowden, Henry W., Church History in the Age of Science: Historiographical Patterns in the United States 1876–1918 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1971), pp. 63–93.Google Scholar

10. Bowden, Church History in the Age of Science, p. xiv.

11. Ibid., pp. 8–9.

12. Jackson to Adams, 4 May 1888, RG 36–1–2, S. M.Jackson Papers, New York University archives, quoted in Bowden, “The First Century: Institutional Identity and Ideas about the Profession,” in A Century of Church History, p. 295.

13. Schaff, Philip, quoted in Bowden, Church History in the Age of Science, p. 57.Google Scholar

14 Bowden, Church History in the Age of Science, p. 227.

15. Ibid., pp. 237–245 (“Appendix: The American Society of Church History”).

16. Ibid., pp. 244–245.

17. Ibid., pp. 225–238.

18. Ibid., p. 235.

19. Bergquist, William, The Postmodern Organization: Mastering the Art of Irreversible Change (San Francisco, Calif., 1993).Google Scholar

20. Ibid., p. 41

21. Ibid., p. 64.

22. Ibid., pp. 120–122.

23. Ibid., pp. 135–136.

24. Ibid., pp. 148–149.