Customer Reviews

How to Turn the Other Cheek and Still Survive in Today's World

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Most people sort of uncomfortably gloss over Jesus' words about turning the other cheek. We think of Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. and conclude that we're not "spiritual" enough to live out his teachings. Or maybe the conflicts we encounter are just too messy, to wrapped up with "the way the world works" to have anything to do with this spiritual stuff. Elgin shows that Jesus was not commanding passivity, but instead encouraging us to respond actively and lovingly to those "difficult" people in our lives -- even those who have power over us. Her approach combines decent biblical wisdom with sophisticated knowledge of human communication to produce a really practical guide to all kinds of everyday conflicts.

I'm teaching graduate students in dispute resolution. The information in this book, especially the sensory mode matching, is extremely useful on a practical level.

Elgin raises good questions in her book, but the situations are somewhat overdramatized. The worst part of the book, however, is its emphasis on "matching styles (hear/see/touch)" to achieve better communication. For example, if the speaker uses a lot of "hearing" words such as "That sounds strange" or "Can't you just listen to me", then you should respond with similar "hearing" vocabulary. In my opinion, this is just window dressing for the main issue: sticking to Proverbs 15:1 ("A gentle answer turns away wrath") will get you a lot farther.

One good point about the book was that it brought up a good rule: assume that someone is speaking the truth (no matter how ridiculous it sounds), and try to find out why the speaker believes that is true. This tehcnique of "putting yourself in the other person's shoes" is also explaned well in Covey's _7 Habits of Highly Effective People_.