[rnotes]
Writer and theologian Jane Williams examines the relationship between learning and language and the tension between what we know in our hearts and what we can articulate.
Jane starts by looking at the beginning of life, when we exist in a pre-verbal stage. As wondrous as it is to see the arrival of speech in a child, there has long been a sense that children lose something as they try to contain their world in language.
Speech is one of the primary metaphors for God’s communication. Jane explores the extraordinary mixed metaphor of a Divine Language that becomes a human being and, even more strangely, a human being who has to learn to speak. The Word of God made wordless, a baby able only to cry and babble.
As a theologian it is Jane’s job – and her delight – to try to render our understanding of God in words. She explains that words are bound to be incomplete, but that’s not an admission of failure, it’s a celebration of the fact that language has its limits.
Presenter: Jane Williams
Producer: Max O’Brien
A TBI Media production for BBC Radio 4.
Music Played
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English Baroque Soloists and John Eliot Gardiner
Monteverdi’s Vespers – Duo Seraphim
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The Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
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Michael Rabin
Paganini’s Caprice for solo violin no. 24
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Tamas Vasary
Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Paganini, Op. 35
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Julius Katchen
Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini Op. 43
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Hugh Bean
Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending
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Anoushka Shankar
Bairagi
Readings
Author: Blaise Pascal
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Title: Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Author: Sigmund Freud
Publisher: Hogarth Press
Title: Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
Author: William Wordsworth
Publisher: Forgotten Books
Title: The Claim of Reason
Author: Stanley Cavell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Title: Jabberwocky
Author: Lewis Carol
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Title: John I, The Bible, NIV
Author: NA
Publisher: Hodder Classics
Title: Trinity Sunday
Author: Malcolm Guite
Publisher: Canterbury Press
Title: Spring and Fall
Author: Gerard Manley Hopkins
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Title: Little Gidding
Author: T.S Eliot
Publisher: Faber Poetry
[/rnotes]
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