Currently reading: Untamed Hospitality (The Christian Practice of Everyday Life) by Elizabeth Newman 📚
Representational speech will carry a good many features that are irrelevant to prediction and control, but answer to something more like a sheer desire to understand and to deploy verbal symbols in ways that enlarge the repertoire of communication that can be both purposive and more playful or (to use a loaded word) contemplative—attuned both to scientia and sapientia in the language St Augustine used to distinguish instrumental and reflective or contemplative knowing, knowing whose point is simply knowing, in the sense of intelligently enjoying the presence of the other.
Literal and metaphorical speech are not related as more and less ‘faithful’ representations of an object: both seek to secure the intelligible presence of what is perceived. But it is arguable that the metaphorical, or at least the non-slavishly literal, has in some circumstances a better chance of representing what is spoken of, in so far as it seeks to identify a form of action that is active within another phenomenal shape—so that the distinctive form appears (paradoxically) more plainly when ‘playing away from home,’ detached from its original specific embodiment and linked to another context; just as the distinctive feature of or moment in the life of the ‘host’ subject becomes more itself when phrased in a borrowed terminology.
Currently reading: The Edge of Words by Rowan Williams 📚
Finished reading: God Save Texas by Lawrence Wright 📚
Finished reading: Church Unique by Will Mancini 📚
Finished reading: Exclusion & Embrace by Miroslav Volf 📚
One of the best theological texts I’ve ever read.
‘It must be inconvenient to be made of flesh,’ said the Scarecrow, thoughtfully, ‘for you must sleep, and eat and drink. However, you have brains, and it is worth a lot of bother to be able to think properly.’