Leadershift is the final essay in my “Shift Happens” series.

In part 1, I revisit the theme of my 1989 Sunstone speech “A Plea to the Leadership of the Church: Choose Love Not Power” and examine why church and state leaders tend to shift steadily from compassion to control, from ethics to self-preservation, from love to power.

In part 2, I discuss how this shift illuminates God’s perceived failure to exercise divine leadership to intervene to prevent pain and evil, which is perhaps the most potent reason for the individual abandonment of theism for atheism.

Paul Toscano