Criticism and Controversy
In 2008, Jeff McSwain, the Area Director of Durham and Chapel Hill, along with others, was fired after taking issue with the organization's "sin talks." McSwain's theology emphasizes that "God has a covenant, marriage-like relationship with the world he has created, not a contract relationship that demands obedience prior to acceptance ." This statement alludes Young Life's Calvinism . Tony Jones describes Young Life’s Statement of “non-negotiatables” as telling staffers that “they must not introduce the concept of Jesus and his grace until the students have been sufficiently convinced of their own depravity and been allowed to stew in that depravity" . Eight members of Young Life's teaching staff based in Durham, North Carolina resigned their positions after these "non-negotiables" were announced.
The President of Young Life, Dennis Rydberg, was paid $512,716 from the organization in 2010. The high income of Rydberg has stirred controversy.
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Famous quotes containing the words criticism and, criticism and/or controversy:
“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“...I wasn’t at all prepared for the avalanche of criticism that overwhelmed me. You would have thought I had murdered someone, and perhaps I had, but only to give her successor a chance to live. It was a very sad business indeed to be made to feel that my success depended solely, or at least in large part, on a head of hair.”
—Mary Pickford (1893–1979)
“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)