The serious doubter, the sincere enquirer, the person who hesitates a long time on a threshold, these are all people to be honoured and encouraged, not, as is so often the case, either demonized or cajoled.
Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness
Pole-dancing and the end of universities as centres of humane critique
We are living through a point in the history of Western academia so momentous it’s hard for us to wrap our minds around it – namely, the effectual end of universities as centres of humane critique, the effectual end of an enormously rich and diverse and valuable tradition, which has always had to struggle to carve out a task for itself that is often at odds with the priorities of society. Today, in almost every country in the world, academia is capitulating, almost without a struggle, to the philistine and sometimes barbaric values of neo-capitalism.
Thus Terry Eagleton in an interview published in Third Way, February 2015, who adds:
A couple of years ago, I was being shown around the biggest university in South Korea by its proud president and I made the unseemly blunder of saying: ‘There doesn’t seem to be anything critical going on here.’ He looked at me as though I had said, ‘How many PhDs in pole-dancing have you awarded?’ With the best will in the world, he had absolutely no idea what I meant.
Window
The familiar face of the person we live with, the quality of their steadfast covenant love, can suddenly become a window through which the face of the God who loves us in and through them shines.
Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness
Creating your world
The way you tell the story about your world will … co-create that world.
Gareth Higgins, ‘Here isn’t the news’, Third Way, Summer 2014
Education, passivity and God’s plan for humanity
I was rather interested in Michel de Verteuil’s comment (in: Let All the Peoples Praise Him: Lectio Divina and the Psalms) that
because of the insights of great educators like Paulo Freire, we are conscious that the education system encourages passivity; it frustrates God’s plan for humanity.
I can certainly relate to our education system encouraging passivity, which seems true in so many ways. I’ve thought before that I ought to read Paulo Freire myself sometime. De Verteuil’s comment has just reinforced that.
The body was even scarier
Interesting thoughts by Margaret Atwood on ‘dirty words’:
The bad ones in French are the religious ones, the worst ones in any language were what they were most afraid of and in English it was the body, that was even scarier than God.
From Surfacing.
Karl Möller 