Called to Ethical Leadership at Intersections Where Worlds Collide
This closing plenary session addresses the current crisis of ethical leadership in local, national, and global communities, as well as the complex issues and challenges of leading ethically at the intersections of life worlds and systems. Those who are called to stand at these intersections—where worlds collide—must take on work that is, at best, hazardous duty. When leaders ask people to change, they must expect resistance.
This plenary address will describe the vocation of leadership as one that requires a person to discern, deliberate, and decide on fitting responses to challenges that arise at these intersections. This in turn requires re-examination of core values and assumptions about identity (character), about relationships with others in one’s environment who are involved in and influence one’s ethical decision-making (civility), and about one’s primary network of discourse and practice (community). This is a call for our institutions to contribute to the formation of a new generation of leaders who are spiritually disciplined, intellectually astute, morally anchored, and socially and emotionally whole.