LEADERSHIP AND EMOTIONAL SABOTAGE

Rigney offers a Christian blueprint for improving relationships in this leadership book.

The author opens his work with a grim diagnosis of the current state of society, in which politicians move from failure to failure, social threads are fraying, and “hardly anyone takes responsibility for themselves, their emotions, their actions, and their situation.” Rigney attempts to craft a “biblical cure” for these ills, and he bases part of his solution on the late therapist and rabbi Edwin H. Friedman’s bestseller A Failure of Nerve (2007), which he considers “an essential book for Christian leaders.” Early on, he takes Friedman’s essential idea of “differentiation” and expands on it with a reference to William Shakespeare’s play Troilus and Cressida and its notion of “Degree.” Every society, Rigney asserts, has important “relationships of difference” in which a husband has authority over a wife, a parent over a child, a pastor over a congregation, and so on. He cautions readers not to stray from these bedrock “degrees,” and notes that pressure to do so will come from “those closest to you.” He addresses his book to his fellow men (“all of us, as husbands and fathers”), who would occupy all the positions of leadership in this vision of society, which won’t appeal to all readers; in one chapter, “Courage in the Home,” he even condemns the notion of “acquiescing to one’s wife.” Skeptical readers will not be won over by such assertions, or by the author’s opposition to concepts of evolutionary biology, which he calls “gobbledygook.” However, those who share his beliefs will likely be cheered by his call to be “cool as a cucumber” in their faith, “because we know that Christ is risen, reigning, and working for our good.”

A straightforward, hierarchical plan for fixing society’s problems that will appeal to a limited audience.