Word: assisi
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...time when best-selling management-advice books tell corporate leaders how to behave like Attila the Hun, the philosophy at Herman Miller, Inc., is more closely attuned to the gentle precepts of St. Francis of Assisi. As described by chairman Max De Pree, 64, in Leadership Is an Art (Doubleday; $17.95), modern corporations should be communities, not battlefields. At their heart lie "covenants" between executives and employees that rest on "shared commitment to ideas, to issues, to values, to goals, and to management processes. Words such as love, warmth, personal chemistry are certainly pertinent...
That is especially true when it comes to concrete: while the flamingos and , their kin are concentrated up front, near the highway, the enormous side yard is filled with concrete birdbaths, statues (including Jesus, St. Francis of Assisi, gnomes, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck), decorative paving stones, planters and fountains, all neatly stacked in piles up to 6 ft. high. Most impressive is Harper's collection of concrete animals. He has 20 types of deer alone, ranging in size from a miniature fawn up to the just departed buck, and 18 kinds of frogs. There are also lifelike rabbits, geese...
...most remarkable of all, usually exhibited at the National Gallery in London, is the life-size kneeling figure of St. Francis in Meditation, painted at the height of Zurbaran's career, in the late 1630s. This is not the St. Francis of earlier legend, warbling to the birds of Assisi about Brother Sun and Sister Moon. Spanish Catholicism in the 16th and 17th centuries invented a new St. Francis, a death-haunted monk whose images would force the faithful to think about their own dissolution...
Despite that ideal, the Pope's audience was aware that Assisi symbolically went well beyond the ceremonial friendship accorded other faiths by any previous Pontiff. The assemblage included not only monotheists but believers in creeds once labeled "heathen" and "pagan" by a church that for centuries had preached unambiguously that there was no salvation outside its walls. The astonishing variety of the invited group also raised suspicions among some Christians that Assisi represented a heretical step toward syncretism, the amalgamation of various conflicting religions. For this reason, U.S. Fundamentalist Gadfly Carl McIntire branded the meeting the "greatest single abomination...
...Pope was well aware of such concerns. "Certainly we cannot pray together, namely, to make a common prayer," he explained, "but we can be present while others pray." That, in fact, is what occurred. During the morning, each faith met for separate devotions in and around Assisi, and when all groups later gathered in the piazza, no interreligious rite was used; individual delegates gave their own invocations...