gratitude: sermon at sunday assembly boston, october 18, 2015
TRANSCRIPT
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Gratitude Sermon at Sunday Assembly Boston
October 18, 2015
“a large body of literature has developed showing that gratitude is related to a wide variety of forms of well-being”
Wood, A. M., Froh, J. J., & Geraghty, A. W. (2010). Gratitude and well-being: A review and theoretical integration. Clinical psychology review, 30(7), 890-905.
“when one views a partner’s offer in an exchange as a gift, then he or she is grateful and happy in the marriage”
Alberts, J. K., Tracy, S. J., & Trethewey, A. (2011). An integrative theory of the division of domestic labor: Threshold level, social organizing and sensemaking. Journal of Family Communication, 11(1), 21-38.
“The adult who works hard to guide and foster the next generation may make sense of his or her strong commitment [….] in terms of redemption sequences”
McAdams, D. P., Diamond, A., de St Aubin, E., & Mansfield, E. (1997). Stories of commitment: The psychosocial construction of generative lives. Journal of personality and social psychology, 72(3), 678.
“According to the Thank-You theory, an act of paternalism is justified if the subject is thankful that the act was done.
It is the subject's thankfulness that gets the paternalist off the moral hook.”
Kasachkoff, T. (1994). Paternalism: does gratitude make it okay?. Social Theory and Practice, 1-23.
“What are needed are new networks, readily available to the public and designed to spread equal opportunity”
Illich, I. (1970). Learning webs. Deschooling society.
“Community Memory terminal at Leopold’s Records, Berkeley, California" Photo by Lee Felenstein, 1975 Source: Computer History Museum
NegotiatedExchange
ReciprocalExchange
GroupExchange
NetworkExchange
Lampinen, A., Lehtinen, V., Cheshire, C., & Suhonen, E. (2013, February). Indebtedness and reciprocity in local online exchange. In CSCW 2013 (pp. 661-672). ACM.
Lampinen, A., Lehtinen, V., Cheshire, C., & Suhonen, E. (2013, February). Indebtedness and reciprocity in local online exchange. In CSCW 2013 (pp. 661-672). ACM.
“it feels a little like being a parasite”
“I assumed that I would be… a nuisance”
“I have not gotten a chance to return the favor to anyone, so I still owe that favor"
“Offering small tokens of appreciation, gratuitously accepting them, or rejecting gifts as “kind but unnecessary”
is important for acknowledging one’s exchange partner and managing feelings of indebtedness”
Lampinen, A., Lehtinen, V., Cheshire, C., & Suhonen, E. (2013, February). Indebtedness and reciprocity in local online exchange. In CSCW 2013 (pp. 661-672). ACM.
“Individuals tend to accept support from those ‘of a kind they could themselves return on occasion.’”
Lampinen, A., Lehtinen, V., Cheshire, C., & Suhonen, E. (2013, February). Indebtedness and reciprocity in local online exchange. In CSCW 2013 (pp. 661-672). ACM.
“Athenian democrats regarded gift and gratitude as politically dangerous. Elites bound by reciprocal services pursue their own interests rather than the common good”
Leithart. Peter. “The Dark Side of Gratitude.” First Things, August, 2012.
GroupExchange
Ongoing research with Emily Harburg, Erhardt Graeff, Michael Greenberg
“The sense of genuine giving and receiving is a part of love,
thus it is through gifts that we express love”
Alberts, J. K., Tracy, S. J., & Trethewey, A. (2011). An integrative theory of the division of domestic labor: Threshold level, social organizing and sensemaking. Journal of Family Communication, 11(1), 21-38.
“Sometimes couples agree on the definition of a gift, but…
a marriage may contain two separate and conflicting baselines”
Alberts, J. K., Tracy, S. J., & Trethewey, A. (2011). An integrative theory of the division of domestic labor: Threshold level, social organizing and sensemaking. Journal of Family Communication, 11(1), 21-38.
Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?
Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays” from Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher. Copyright ©1966 by Robert Hayden.
“thinking about the absence of a positive event [or person] from one's life”
Koo, M., Algoe, S. B., Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2008). It's a wonderful life: mentally subtracting positive events improves people's affective states, contrary to their affective forecasts. Journal of personality and social psychology, 95(5), 1217.
Other References
Hochschild, A., & Machung, A. (2012). The second shift: Working families and the revolution at home. Penguin.
Benkler, Y. (2011). The penguin and the leviathan: How cooperation triumphs over self-interest. Crown Business.
Zuckerman, E. (2013). Rewire: Digital cosmopolitans in the age of connection. WW Norton, Incorporated.