WHERE GOOD SEXUAL ETHICS ARE TO BE FOUND

'I suspect that a fuller exploration of the sexual metaphors of the Bible will have more to teach us about a theology and ethics of sexual desire than will the flat citation of isolated texts; and I hope other theologians will find this worth following up more fully than I can do here.' 

Rowan Williams, 'The Body's Grace' in Theology and Sexuality (Ed.: Rogers), p.320. 

THE QUESTION SAME-SEX LOVE POSES

'Same-sex love annoyingly poses the question of what the meaning of desire is - in itself, not considered as instrumental to some other process, such as the peopling of the world.' 

Rowan Williams, 'The Body's Grace' in Theology and Sexuality (Ed.: Rogers), p.318. 

SEXUAL ETHICS GONE WRONG

'It has often been said, especially by feminist writers, that the making of my body into a distant and dangerous object that can be either subdued or placated with quick gratification is the root of sexual oppression. If my body isn't me, then the desiring perception of my body is bound up with an area of danger and foreignness, and I act toward whatever involves me in desiring and being desired with fear and hostility.'

Rowan Williams, 'The Body's Grace' in Theology and Sexuality (Ed.: Rogers), p.315. 

THE GOOD IN SEXUAL SIN?

'...an absolute declaration that every sexual partnership must conform to the pattern of commitment or else have the nature of sin and nothing else is unreal and silly. People do discover - as does Sarah Layton - a grace in encounters fraught with transitoriness and without much "promising" (in any sense): it may be just this that prompts them to want the fuller, longer exploration of the body's grace that faithfulness offers. Recognizing this - which is no more recognizing the facts of a lot of people's histories, heterosexual or homosexual, in our society - ought to be something we can do without generating anxieties about weakening or compromising the focal significance of commitment and promise in our Christian understanding and "moral imagining" of what sexual bonding can be.'  

Rowan Williams, 'The Body's Grace' in Theology and Sexuality: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Edited by Eugene F Rogers Jr.), p.315. 

SUFFERING IS BETTER THAN SIN

'Sin is often thought of as being motivated by the temptation for pleasure. But perhaps the real power of sin lies in the avoidance of pain and suffering. It is better to suffer unfulfilled needs and desires than to sin. Is this not what self-denial means?' 

Karen H Jobes, 1 Peter: Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament, p.5. 

CLAIMING OUR INHERITANCE

'...when you look into the book of God and find any promise there, you may make it your own; just as an heir who rides over a lot of fields and meadows says. This meadow is my inheritance, and this corn field is my inheritance, and the he sees a fine house, and says, This fine house is my inheritance. He looks at them with a different eye from a stranger who rides over those fields. A carnal heart reads the promises, and reads them merely as stories, not that he has any great interest in them. But every time a godly man reads the Scriptures (remember this when you are reading the Scripture) and there meets a promise, he ought to lay his hand upon it and say, This is part of my inheritance, it is mine, and I am to live upon it.' 

Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, p.83. 

THE SUFFICIENCY OF THE CONTENTMENT THE SCRIPTURES PROVIDE

'There is no condition that a godly man or woman can be in, but there is some promise or other in the Scripture to help him in that condition. And that is the way of his contentment, to go to the promises, and get from the promise, that which may supply.'

Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, p.69. 

THANKFULNESS IN SMALL THINGS

'Every bit of bread you eat, if you are a godly man or woman, Jesus Christ has bought it for you. You go to the market and buy your meat and drink with your money, but know that before you buy it, or pay money, Christ has bought it at the hand of God the Father with his blood. You have it at the hands of men for money, but Christ has bought it at the hand of his Father by his blood. Certainly it is a great deal better and sweeter now, though it is but a little.' 

Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, p.59. 

THE SECRET OF CONTENTMENT

'...I know nothing more effective for quieting a Christian soul and getting contentment than this, setting your heart to work in the duties of the immediate circumstances that you are in, and taking heed of your thoughts about other conditions as a mere temptation.' 

Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, p.52. 

BETTER AFFLICTION THAN PROSPERITY?

'You do not find one godly man who came out of affliction worse than he went into it; though for a while he was shaken, yet at last he was better for the affliction. But a great many godly men, you find, have been worse for their prosperity.' 

Jeremiah Burroughs, A Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, p.50. 

GOD ALONE SATIFIES

'A soul that is capable of God can be filled with nothing else but God; nothing but God can fill a soul that is capable of God.' 

Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, p.43. 

CONTENTMENT IN SUFFERING

'...contentment, the mingling of joy and sorrow, of gracious joy and gracious sorrow together. Grace teaches us how to moderate and to order an affliction so that there shall be a sense of it, and yet for all that contentment under it.' 

Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, p.41.

A GOOD SERMON INTRODUCTION

'I began that sermon by quoting Winnie the Pooh (which is a great temptation on many occasions).' 

Rowan Williams, Being Human, p.101. 

WHY WE NEED THE SOUND OF SILENCE

'...moments of silence, silence imposing itself on us, are so very important not only for our humanity in general because we habitually live in a world where the "right thing"to do with critical moments is to stop them being critical. The right thing to do with a wild animal is to tame it, so to speak, and the right thing to do with any "wild" experience is to work out what I can do with it, what I can make of it, and, in short, domesticate it.'...

A growing humanity, a maturing humanity, is one that's prepared for silence, because it's prepared at important moments to say "I can't domesticate, I can't get on top of this."'

Rowan Williams, Being Human, p.91. 

WHAT MAKES DEPENDENCE ON GOD DIFFERENT

'To be unconditionally dependent on another human subject is to be in deep danger of repressive, dehumanizing patterns of relation. To depend on God in the context I have outlined is precisely to be delivered from this. God is not another ego greedy to control.'

Rowan Williams, Being Human, p.83. 

AN UNTOLD STORY OF OUR TIME

'Increasingly, one of the marks of a fully and uncompromisingly secular environment is the notion of undifferentiated time. There are, for mature late capitalism, no such tings as weekends. The problem with this kind of secularism is not so much a denial of the existence of God as the denial of the possibility of leisure - of time that is not spent serving the market. That is to say, for a particular mindset, acquisitive and purpose-driven, the passage of time is precisely the slipping away of a scarce, valuable commodity, every moment of which has to be made to yield its maximum possible result, so you can't afford to stop. This kind of secular understanding of the passage of time is perhaps one of those areas where there is most open collision between the fundamentally religious and the fundamentally anti-religious mindset - and I think that's one of the untold stories of our time.' 

Rowan Williams, Being Human, p.78. 

THE GOOD DIFFICULTY DOES

'I think difficulty is good for us, and I say that not just as an excuse for writing some of the books I've written, which I'm told are not always easy reading. I say it because difficulty is one of those things that, rather obviously, obliges us to take time. The more time we take, the more our discovery is likely to turn into habit and into inhabiting. The less time we take over something, the easier we find something to resolve, map and digest, the less value, the less significance it will have. It's a rather old chestnut: Platonic philosophers and early Christian theologians were saying millennia back that the more easily you thought you'd got to know something, the less you'd care about it. Difficulty imposes discipline: it imposes the willingness to believe tat there is more to work on. And by reminding us that getting to where we are has taken time, it can also be one of the things that reminds us that our current cultural perspective, temporal or geographical, is not the obvious one. Taking time, the awareness of the "more" that we have not yet absorbed, may be one of the things (may be, but doesn't need to be) making us that little bit more patient with the criticism, the challenge, the alternative view, of another world, another culture, another person. It may be one of those things that builds solidarity rather than division, something, in other words, that extends the cooperation that properly belongs to knowledge.' 

Rowan Williams, Being Human, p.64. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF EMPATHY

'Empathy. that is,the imaginative identification with a perspective that is not my own, is not just an optional extra in our human identity and our human repertoire, it's something without which we cannot know ourselves. Without identification with the other, I don't know myself.' 

Rowan Williams, Being Human, p.58. 

OUR RELATIONSHIP TO GOD DEFINES, AND DIGNIFIES, US ALL

'...when I look around, my neighbour is also always somebody who is already in relation with God before they're in relation with me. That means that there's a very serious limit on my freedom to make of my neighbour what I choose, because, to put it very bluntly, they don't belong to me, and their relation to me is not all that is true of them, or even the most important thing that is true of them.' 

Rowan Williams, Being Human: Bodies, minds, persons, p.37.

GOD'S FORGIVENESS IS THE MOST READILY AVAILABLE FORGIVENESS

'The good news is that it's easier to be restored to a positive relationship with God than with any other being. As difficult as this is to grasp, when we do, it's happiness making in the extreme.' 

Randy Alcorn, Does Want Us to Be Happy? p.110.  

JOY = HAPPINESS

'The notion that we can have joy without happiness has perverted the meaning of both words and helped spawn a culture of Christian curmudgeons. Feeling morally superior, they may affirm that they have the joy of Jesus deep in their hearts, but apparently it's so deep it never makes the way to their faces.' 

Randy Alcorn, Does God Want Us to Be Happy? p.48. 

THE DANGER OF JUST FOLLOWING YOUR DESIRES

'The most dangerous thing you can do is take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us devils if we set it up as an absolute guide.' 

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.10. 

THE BURDEN OF SELF-CONSTRUCTION

'Modern notions of selfhood amplify our individual responsibilities and opportunities in this regard. In former times, when prevalent mental frameworks sealed the individual within an envelope of community, mapping the world was more of a shared effort. Today, imagining ourselves to be autonomous, we shoulder the burden of psychic self-construction in relative isolation. It must have been far less taxing to assume one's place in the choir than it is to improvise these solos.' 

Peter Korn, Why We Make Things & Why It Matters, p.61. 

THE ESSENCE OF ART

'What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind.' 

Carl Jung in Peter Korn, Why We Make Things & Why It Matters, p.155. 

IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION

'...constructing an identity is not a self-contained project. One's sense of self is a fluctuating assemblage of beliefs and feelings strongly influenced by external circumstances, especially the beliefs of other people.' 

Peter Korn, Why We Make Things & Why It Matters, p.67. 

READING/ WRITING SOMETHING VS. CREATING/ APPRECIATING AN OBJECT OF ART

'Reading text is a linear progression where one idea follows another like the news crawl at the bottom of a television screen. On the positive side, this gives a writer significant control of the step-by-step process through which a reader accesses ideas. On the downside, only one thought can be presented at a time.The remainder of the author's composition is either receding into the netherworld of memory or invisibly waiting in the wings for its moment on stage. In contrast, a craft object, is a collage in which many pieces and levels of information are read in relationship to each other in the present...A craftsman cannot control a respondent's path through this information as tightly as as an author, but the craftsman has the advantage of making complex structures of information simultaneously apparent. His picture is worth the proverbial thousand words.' 

Peter Korn, Why We Make Things & Why It Matters, p.64. 

CREATIVITY AS A COMMUNICATION EXERCISE

'We are socially embraided to such an extent that the architecture of our thoughts is a communal construction. Anything I create becomes a doorway through which others can access my ideas and concerns, if they care to.' 

Peter Korn, Why We Make Things & Why It Matters, p.63. 

TANGIBLE ACHIEVEMENTS

'The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, who has no real effect on the world. But craftmanship must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one's failure or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.' 

Matthew Crawford in Peter Korn, Why We Make Things & Why It Matters, p.56. 

IN THE ZONE

'Through personal experience, acquaintance with hundreds of other craftspeople, and interaction with thousands of students, I have witnesses the pleasure and empowerment that skilled craftwork offers. There is a deep centredness in trusting one's hands, mind, and imagination to work as a single, well-tuned instrument, a centredness that touches upon the very essence of fulfillment. What better way to inhabit one's innate human capabilities productively and powerfully, like an engine firing smoothly on all pistons.'

Peter Korn, Why We Make Things & Why It Matters, p.53.

THE PLEASURE OF CREATIVITY

'...my experience has been that the effort to bring something new and meaningful into the world - whether in the arts, the kitchen, or the marketplace - is exactly what generates the sense of meaning and fulfillment for which so many of us yearn so deeply.' 

Peter Korn, Why We Make Things & Why It Matters: The Education of a Craftsman, p.13. 

THE POWER OF AN ACCENT

'Vast crowds of people. mostly upper-middle class, the women with the sort of voices one supposes breeds Communism.' 

Kenneth Rose, Who's In, Who's Out: The Journals of Kenneth Rose, Volume One 1944-1979 (Edited by DR Thorpe), p.78. 

OUR SOCIETAL SELF-HARM

'Language is only language; we need, rather, to hear the cries of those who don't feel happy in their skins, to dare to find out the source of their misery. We, as a society, need to be brave enough to hear the truth: 'It's you we don't like, the society which nurtured us, or forgot to nurture us. You haven't made a good home for us here. We hate our stupid gender scripts you foisted on us, we don't feel beautiful, we don't feel successful, and we don't feel we matter.' 

And aren't they right? Isn't it time to do away with the male tribe and the female tribe and become people again? Hasn't the time come to unravel our uber-sexualisation? To put the spotlight on what joins us, and not what divides us?' 

Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn't Matter, p.270. 

REAL LOVE

'Real love is the very opposite of idealisation. Rather, it has to do with knowledge, a deep, real, sensitive knowledge of the other people in your life and the care you give them. Love is a kind of knowing. 

The real lover is neither Rossetti or Picasso. The real lover is the man who broke down on Women's Hour this morning. He spent three years looking after his dying wife, tending her each day, doing her teeth, washing her hair, putting a new necklace around her neck each morning, something she had done for herself before she got dementia.  

'Why don't you put her in a home and get a life?' his friends would ask him. 

'Because she is my life,' he told them.' 

Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn't Matter, p.222. 

IN RELINQUISHING JUDGEMENTALISM WE'VE RELINQUISHED IDEALS

'Nowadays, there are few greater character defects than being judgmental. But in relinquishing judgement, we also relinquish ideals. The ideal of fidelity, the ideal of a family life, with a mother and a father; the ideals of honour, self-control and reverence. The old establishment, the clergy, schools, family and community life were by no means perfect and squeaky clean, but they offered a backdrop that was safe in this tricky business of being human. Sometimes, perhaps, it's better, easier, not to have too much choice. There's a word in German, angst, which perfectly describes the mental anxiety we experience when too many options are presented to us. This hyper-individualism is not good for us, this obsessive introspection isn't making us happy. Sometimes our young don't even know they are boys or girls, men or women, and nobody bothers to point out to them that bodies are just bodies, they can't be blamed. It's only societies which make mistakes.'

Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn't Matter, p.190  

SEXUAL ABUSE BY IDEOLOGY

'When I told a friend that I was going to write this book - a close friend who has known me for twenty years - she said to me, 'Olivia, I have never seen you so angry Where has your anger come from?' I told her that I had been abused, not by another without my permission, neither by Jimmy Saville, nor a film producer, nor a priest. Rather, I have been abused by the dominant ideology of the day: that sex is important and profound and you are obliged to join in.' 

Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn't Matter, p.160.