International Journal of Servant-Leadership
Article Title
The Universal Servant: Reflections on Robert Greenleaf's Servant-Leadership as Related to Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory
Abstract
The Question As a Christian pastor I appreciate the physical acts of worship, performed by people situated in place, space, and time. When people lift their hands in grateful worship and engage in a plethora of other meaningful activities, their circulatory, digestive, endocrine, immune, lymphatic, muscular, neural, reproductive, respiratory, skeletal, and urinary systems all participate in some manner to make human actions possible. These multiple acts of creativity depend on a universe conducive to life. Put more evocatively, we might state that all of us and the world surrounding us are served by the universe or nothing would exist. This primary human experience of universal servanthood gives rise secondarily to the poetic expressions of worship introducing this article. As socially constructed meaning in interaction with physical reality (Crotty, 1998), these religious verses across traditions speak of how creation, often at the behest of a creator, serves life. This primary human experience of universal servanthood also begs a question: To what extent can the universe, at its most foundational physical level, be conceptualized as a servant to life? Asked more finely, is there a scientific theory-likewise a social construction of meaning interacting with physical reality-that resonates sufficiently with the servant-leadership described by Robert Greenleaf (1977, 2003) to permit conceiving of the universe as a servant, that is, as modeling servant-leadership? As we shall see shortly, one candidate for such a scientific theory might be String Theory (Greene, 2003).