Lines of thought

"I really don’t see the point of reading in straight lines. We don’t think like that and we don’t live like that. Our mental processes are closer to a maze than a motorway, every turning yields another turning, not symmetrical, not obvious. Not chaos either."

Jeanette Winterton Oranges are not the only fruit Vintage (2001)- quote picked up from Friday Mailing

from Max Warren

When we approach the man of another faith than our own it will be in a spirit of expectancy to find how God has been speaking to him and what new understandings of the grace and love of God we may ourselves discover in this encounter. Our first task in approaching another people, another culture, another religion, is to take off our shoes, for the place we are approaching is holy. Else we may find ourselves treading on men’s dreams. More serious still, we may forget that God was here before our arrival.
Picked up from Simon Marsh's blog.

"Though I speak with the tongues of humans and angels, and even have interactive Applets embedded in my PowerPoints, but have not pedagogy, I am become as sounding brass and a clanging cymbal"

Steve Delamarter et al Teaching Theology and Religion, 2007, vol 10 no.2, pp. 64-79

Ethics of education

"When we deal with ethics in education (and often we ignore it altogether), we approach it as a matter of helping individuals develop standards for personal behaviour. Not only do we stress personal at the expense of communal ethics: deeper still, we ignore the fact that the presence, or absence of communal imagery at every level of teaching and learning can form, or deform, students for life in the world. We underestimate the hidden curriculum of ethics that is being taught in classrooms even - and perhaps especially - when ethics is not the formal topic."

Leadership

When the best leader's work is done, the people say, "We did it ourselves".
(Lao-Tzu)

Love

When one who professes love is wholly in control of the object of his love, then the falsity of love is exposed. Love ins the activity for the sake of an other: and where the object of love is wholly under the control of the one who loves, that object is no longer an other. It is a part or extension of the professed lover. Where the object of love is truly an other the activity of love is always precarious ... it contains no assurance or certainty of completion: much may be expended and little achieved. the progress of love must always be by tentative and precarious steps: and each step that is taken, whether it "succeeds" or "fails", becomes the basis for the next, and equally precarious, step which must follow. Love proceeds by no assured programme.

W.H. Vanstone; Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense p46

Man of conversation

Jesus always has time for conversation. He has animated conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well, and the man born blind, anyone he meets. He will eat, drink and pass time with everyone: prostitutes, the hated tax collectors, religious leaders, lepers. God's word became flesh - not, initially, in sermons proclaimed from pulpits, in learned books of theology, but in human conversation.
Timothy Radcliffe: Why go to Church? (p53)