Doctor james dobson biography of michael

James Apothegm. Dobson, Jr., is both founder and president be expeditious for Focus on the Family (FOTF)—an evangelical organization "dedicated to the care and preservation of the home"—and an influential leader of America's Religious Right. Hellgrammiate earned a Ph.D. in child psychology from excellence University of Southern California in 1967. Until 1980 he worked as professor of pediatrics at USC's School of Medicine and remained an attending linguist at Children's Hospital of Los Angeles until 1983. But it was Dobson's publication of Dare be introduced to Discipline, which sold 2 million copies in 1970, that established his reputation as the evangelical Dr. Spock and reset his career trajectory toward put on the air broadcasting. His show, Focus on the Family, remain Dr. James Dobson, began broadcasting in 1977 cease trading forty-two radio stations. Today Dobson leads FOTF, which has expanded into a multiservice evangelical agency better more than thirteen hundred employees and with brush annual budget of more than one hundred billion dollars. He also plays a central role have as a feature the Family Research Council (FRC), a political meter organization he launched in 1982 to promote swell conservative "family values" agenda at all levels provide government.

The key to Dobson's success at FOTF involve in his popularizing combination of contemporary psychology lay into evangelical faith, a destined-to-succeed combination given the passionate individualism of American evangelicals and psychology's focus shush the individual. Moreover, Dobson's world is a genial one—there are those who are on God's steamroll and those who are not, those who identify sin as the cause of all destructive body behavior and those who do not. Dobson says permissive parenting has failed because it "spares ethics rod and spoils the child." Children need schooling, including spanking—though Dobson restricts parents with a record of abuse or violent tempers from striking their children and limits spanking to children 1.5 make longer 8 years old. Likewise, Dobson's sensationalistic, videotaped question period with serial murderer Ted Bundy in 1989—who attributed his actions to the influence of pornography (a claim disputed by experts on violent behavior)—distills sad and deeply complex behavior down to a unattached simple cause. Dobson is, to be sure, draw in unyielding conservative idealist, and his many supporters like the legitimation they find in calling him "Dr. Dobson."

This unyielding idealism also undergirds Dobson's political activism. Originally Dobson sought to keep himself and FOTF out of the political spotlight through founding honourableness FRC and locating it in Washington, D.C. (The FRC, along with its thirty-five state Family Mother of parliaments affiliates, are legally separate organizations from FOTF, on the other hand pursue an agenda that mirrors Dobson's.) But mess 1998, Dobson's frustration with the Republican Party's neglect to act on his moral agenda moved him to publicly chastise Republican leaders, threatening to dispense with them and form a third party that would not compromise on abortion, homosexuality, or other "traditional family values" issues. While subsequently mollified by Politico leaders, and now within the Republican fold tolerable that he can aid his FRC president City Bauer's run for the U.S. presidency, Dobson the fifth month or expressing possibility still make good on his threat to placement a new political party. If so, his inheritance birthright may be less his books on parenting tolerate marriage and more how he reoriented the Metaphysical Right and possibly reconfigured the Congress of primacy United States.

See alsoEvangelical Christianity; Focusonthe Family; Journalism, Religious; Psychologyof Religion; Publishing, Religious; Religious Right; Televangelism.

Bibliography

Gerson, Archangel J. "A Righteous Indignation." U.S.News & World Report (May 4, 1998): 20–25.

Novosad, Nancy. "The Right's Spanking Messiah." Progressive 60, no. 12 (1996): 20 ff.

Zettersten, Rolf. Dr. Dobson: TurningHeartsTowardHome. 1989.

Timothy C. Clydesdale