The Knight and The Gardener: Worldviews Make Worlds by Cassidy S. Dale can be downloaded here.

Understanding two master narratives or lenses that people hold can help you understand yourself, understand others, and forecast behavior.

“Knights” are zero sum game people who see themselves — and all people and things — as part of a great war between good and evil or between enlightened reason and destructive ignorance.

“Gardeners” are nonzero sum game people who see themselves — and all people and things — as part of a great garden that should be nurtured and invested in.

Which worldview you hold — Knight or Gardener — shapes what you perceive as heroic or virtuous behavior which in turn influences how you handle your love relationships which then affects how you behave during conflict situations. All of these influence how you approach matters of the soul and view God or the universe.

Knights yearn for The Great Showdown. Gardeners yearn for The Great Breakthrough.

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Religious “Knights” who turn toxic create or adopt combat theologies. Readers who find Combat Theology: How to Weaponize and De-Weaponize a Religion useful will probably find The Knight and The Gardener: Worldviews Make Worlds useful as well.

Combat Theology: How to Weaponize and De-Weaponize a Religion by Cassidy S. Dale is available free for download here.

From the first chapters:

Why do people kill or persecute for God and consider it a virtue?

The answer is that they’ve adopted a combat theology. A combat theology is a sequence of assertions that together argue that God’s will, plan, or people are in jeopardy because of the actions of evil people.

To create a combat theology is to weaponize a religion.

To weaponize a religion is a sin.

This book shows how an evil thing is done and how to stop it when you see it. This book outlines four major ways people weaponize their religions, and starting places for how you can counter each way.

This book is meant to do three things:

• To provide early warning, to show how combat theologies are created so you can recognize when one is being created and adopted.

• To inoculate you against being seduced by a combat theology by showing you how one is created.

• To equip “spiritual first responders”—ministers, journalists, community leaders, commentators, and opinion leaders—to understand and counter combat theologies.

Read the rest here.