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With October comes a new season of webinars from the Yeshua Catholic International Leadership Institute. Two are already scheduled, and more are on the way. In addition, the Institute also offers recorded access to many earlier webinars it has already produced. The new webinars scheduled for October are: Vital Balm: Apologizing, Forgiving and Accepting Forgiveness, Thursday, Oct. 17 at 1 p.m. CST; and, Building High-Performance Parish Teams, Tuesday, Oct. 22, at 1 p.m. CST. “We’ll be announcing more webinars for November and December soon,” says Dr. Owen Phelps, Director of the Yeshua I...

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By Owen Phelps, Ph.D. Director, Yeshua Institute Without the generosity of our benefactors, the Yeshua Catholic International Leaders Institute would not exist. I shared that reality with several of our benefactors at our first-ever Benefactors Mass & Brunch on Aug. 10 at St. James Parish in Rockford, IL. How could I be so sure? Because for several years my wife Jane and I ran the Institute as a division of The Durand Corporation, our own for-profit consulting and publishing business. No, we did not expect this new division to make a profit. That wasn’t our intent at all. Our intent was that the co...

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By Owen Phelps, Ph.D. Director, Yeshua Institute There’s one thing that makes our efforts to be Jesus-like Leaders especially challenging: We can’t focus on self-improvement. What? Isn’t any effort to be better than we are all about improving oneself? Surely, trying to be more of a Jesus-like Leader involves self-improvement. Yes, of course that’s true. Self-improvement is a part of the puzzle. But it’s only a part. It can’t be the central feature. It can’t be the focus. To speak in terms of making one’s own improvement the focus of our efforts is to look in th...

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With October comes a new season of webinars from the Yeshua Catholic International Leadership Institute. Two are already scheduled, and more are on the way. In addition, the Institute also offers recorded access to many earlier webinars it has already produced. The new webinars scheduled for October are: Vital Balm: Apologizing, Forgiving and Accepting Forgiveness, Thursday, Oct. 17 at 1 p.m. CST; and, Building High-Performance Parish Teams, Tuesday, Oct. 22, at 1 p.m. CST. “We’ll be announcing more webinars for November and December soon,” says Dr. Owen Phelps, Director of the Yeshua I...

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As part of its mission “to serve God by helping all members of Christ’s body to love and lead as Jesus loved and led,” the Yeshua Catholic International Leadership Institute offers people access to a wide variety of free webinars and videos on its website, www.YeshuaLeader.com. The site’s Video Gallery includes 44 videos accessible for no fee – most of them under five minutes long. Different titles are targeted to different audiences, including priests, lay ministers and parents, consistent with the Institute’s teaching that “all of us are leaders some of the time.” ...

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By Owen Phelps, Ph.D. Director, Yeshua Institute After decades of reading what various experts – business leaders, HR specialists, psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists and organizational behaviorists – have had to say about what people need and/or want from their work, the best description I have ever encountered fell into my hands this summer quite by accident. Or was it Providential? I’ll let you make the call. Let me settle for providing the details. One quiet summer morning, casually perusing the porch that runs along the length of our cabin overlooking a small, quiet lake, I noti...

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A Catholic Vision for Leading Like Jesus Encounter is scheduled Saturday, Oct. 19, at Immaculate Conception Parish in Hendersonville, NC. The Encounter, which is a rich mix of videos, live presentations and small and large group discussions, runs from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Dave Coe, a parish member and the program’s Facilitator, says the Encounter “will help you be the most effective leader you can possibly be, a Jesus-like leader -- a Servant, Steward and Shepherd -- in every facet of your life. In fact, no matter what good thing you hope to accomplish in your life, this one-day program will help you do it...

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By Owen Phelps, Ph.D. Director, Yeshua Institute In the process of preparing for a small group discussion series in our parish this summer on Bishop Robert Barron’s new book Letter to a Suffering Church: A Bishop Speaks on the Sexual Abuse Crisis, my thoughts drifted back to a year ago when we held our first ever parish small group discussion and the text we used was The Joy of the Gospel (Evangelii Gaudium) by Pope Francis. This year’s discussion of Bishop Barron’s book went very well. It gave people an opportunity to share their heartbreak and anger over the clergy sexual abuse crisis – a...

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By Owen Phelps, Ph.D. Director, Yeshua Institute A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds huge differences between what Americans value today and what they valued in 1998, just 21 years ago. While “hard work” led the list of values in both 1998 and 2019, after that the disparities are striking. Today: 61% of Americans of all ages value patriotism – down nine percentage points from 1998; 50% value religion – down 12 percentage points from 1998; and, 43% value having children – down 16 percentage points from 1998. Age differences Perhaps even more striking w...

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“Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” So began a brief talk by Dr. Owen Phelps at the first Benefactors Mass & Brunch for the Yeshua Catholic International Leadership Institute on Saturday, Aug. 10, at St. James Parish in Rockford, IL. His words echoed those of Dick Kunnert, a Yeshua board member, Senior Fellow and Master Facilitator who served as master of ceremonies at the brunch. Before the brunch Father Dave Beauvais, also a Yeshua board member, served as celebrant and homilist at the Mass. In addition to leading prayers for all of the Institute’s benefactors, he took the occasion to thank t...

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