As I write this, it’s the first Juneteenth that’s a national holiday. It literally became one two days ago. This declaration has been met with unease by many Black voices I’ve been hearing. In this article I plan to unwrap why this is by bringing my usual communication studies lens to the subject, with a dash of Jesus thrown in. In short, declaring Juneteenth a federal holiday is a good step forward in a lot of ways. But especially the…
As a communication scholar, I found the social media reaction to last week’s article about socialism as a devil term fascinating (if also disturbing). This week’s article will dive into some—er, differences of opinion I hold with many of the commenters. But it will also get into some unexpected common ground I found in the comments section among those who support the current US administration and those who dissent from its rhetoric and policies: a fear of tyranny. NOTE: This…
This article is the latest in my series on political disgusts (see part 1, part 2, and part 3 here). I don’t tell a lot of my story this time. But you’ll see that it is connected—I grew up among those who had a deep disgust for Nazis (which meant we always laughed when Harrison Ford would say things in the Indiana Jones movies like “Nazis. I hate these guys”). In this article I’ll talk about how, after much reflection,…
So as I started writing this I was recovering from a Facebook conversation about the Robert DeNiro’s vulgarity. (Literally recovering—as will be discussed in next week’s post, I feel aggression of all kinds can cause literal pain under some circumstances, and as I’ve said, I’ve been there and done that regarding all kinds of conflict situations.) At any rate, I’m very glad I pushed through the twinges to engage in the conversation thoroughly with those of opposing perspectives, if only…
I won’t lie, friends: it’s been a tough week to be grading final exams. Don’t get me wrong: I dearly love seeing the wins during these interpersonal and small group communication and leadership take-home finals. There’s usually nothing as cool as hearing about the ways the concepts my students are learning about conflict styles and stress and shame and civility are already impacting lives. There’s usually nothing so fabulous as hearing the super-smart and shy students talk about how much…
Where were we? Okay, so in the first part of this post we had covered the definitions of assertiveness and a bit about the definitions of what assertiveness is and how I see assertiveness to work based on my studies and teaching of stress, trauma, and conflict communication as well as my life experiences. In this part, I’ll be discussing how this applies to spirituality, and what I mean by assertive spirituality. To be honest, I was a little shocked…
“So what does assertive spirituality look like?’ A friend helpfully said when I was telling her about the idea I had for this new blog. “Does it look like a good thwack over the head?” That’s when it occurred to me that I might want to start things by defining assertiveness for my prospective blog readers. So here it is, dear friends: “Assertiveness,” say Gloria J. Galanes & Katherine Adams in Effective Group Communication: Theory and Practice, “refers to communication behavior…