October 2011
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Community is the overcoming of otherness in living unity.
—Martin Buber
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The learning community, an ever-regenerated community of people who are willing to be present to and for one another, necessarily recognizes and openly discusses multiple points of view. Diversity is not a difficulty to overcome. A learning community’s multiplicity of viewpoints provides the material for ever-recurring dialogues, because each person brings something quite concrete and unique...
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Rather than intervening between a person and the world, the goal of education should be to help one live more deeply in the world.
—Kenneth Kramer, Martin Buber’s I and Thou: Practicing Living Dialogue
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Since, for Buber, “love is responsibility of an I for a Thou,” and given that feelings are within a person while love is between I and Thou, it follows that marriage renews itself through its true origin—namely, through two persons revealing their Thou to each other… A marriage is built upon the saying of Thou.
—Kenneth Kramer, Martin Buber’s I and Thou: Practicing Living...
September 2011
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On Editing:
A good editor, and any good reader of the early drafts, is a midwife. S/he is both tender enough not to shame the groaning or despise the blood and strong enough to demand concentrated focus to push through the pain at the right season. A dear friend who reads and asks good, hard questions invites us to dig deeper, see the horizon, and press on to answer the question, “So what?”
—Dan...
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On Writing:
The world changes the moment we write a sentence, because we can’t write just one. One sentence, one honest series of words, whether grammatically correct or spelled well, calls forth its twin. Two sentences ache for a third. If you write three sentences, you will inevitably write more. And once you are writing, you find that the kind of writing destined to tell the truth and direct your...
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“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child really loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it...
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Why must holy places be dark places?
—C.S. Lewis
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In flipping through and reflecting on some past reading assignments for school, I came across the following excerpt, in discussing what we are to do with difficult texts in the Bible:
“The way I propose here is to consider how the biblical writers themselves dealt with difficult texts, that is, how they handled elements of the tradition that they could no longer accept as ethical or...
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