Gormless, uncouth, inept and ruthless… we’ve lost their kinder, gentler opposites gormful, couth, ept, … and ruthful – full of ruth. What does ruth mean? You have to make a leap from ‘ruthless’ somewhere into the territory of care and concern. Ruth is that piercing sorrow you feel when you can’t dodge someone else’s distress. It’s the ill-defined opposite of hardness of heart.
We need so badly to flesh out that tender term that its such a pity Ruth’s book gets such short shrift today and tomorrow. But those few lines on Ruth’s lips tell us a lot:
‘Wherever you go, I will go, wherever you live, I will live. Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God’.
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August 19th, 2005
Nova has a great page of essays and articles to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s amazing year of discovery.
The page of podcasts got me thinking. Here are ten top physicists given the brief to describe Einstein’s equation to curious non-physicists–and in under a minute or so! The results are fascinating.
What I’ve been wondering is how 10 theologians would get along describing, say, the Resurrection to curious non-theologians in under a minute? (I could have been nasty and made it the Trinity)
I’ve been trying a more modest version in-house with the team here. Maybe it is a challenge you’d like to rise to: describe the impact of the Resurrection in your life and work in under a minute.
There’s a really challenging variant that I am only beginning to ask myself: to describe the impact of Einstein’s equation on my theology, my faith, my work. That would be theology worth the doing.
August 19th, 2005