Anglo-American University in Prague Research Coffee Featuring: Joshua Hayden, Ed.D.
Research Coffee is a series of events aimed to be a platform for discussions about publications, projects, and working papers of AAU Faculty as well as AAU students.
Join us at our next Research Coffee event, scheduled for Friday, April 30, 2021, at 09:30 am, online. The session will be hosted by Joshua Hayden, Ed.D., who will present his paper on “Spiritual Leadership in Social Movements: The Beloved Community and the Solidarity of the Shaken”. AAU faculty members, Gerald Power, Ph.D. and Daniel Padolsky, M.A., will be joining us as discussants of the paper.
You can find the abstract of the paper below, but to receive the full paper and the link to the meeting, please register in advance. We look forward to seeing you online!
Abstract:
This paper examines spiritual leadership through a comparative case study of the Civil Rights Movement in the US and Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. Though they were very different religious contexts, they were led by people grounded in spiritual narratives that informed nonviolent action, human dignity, hope and the moral imagination that animated change. In an early framing of the theory, Fairholm (1994) claimed that “Spirituality made manifest is the essence of leadership”…it is a “vital, energizing force” that “integrates guiding principles of wholeness, relationships, inner wisdom and inner authority”(12). Yet spiritual leadership in social movements has received little scholarly attention as research has historically placed more emphasis on structure than on human agency. Through oral histories, historical analysis, and interviews with participants, this study examines the role of spirituality in relationship-building, story-telling and strategy of both movements.