davidcayley.com

"If I had to choose a sentence from the Old Testament for my blazon," my old friend and teacher Ivan Illich once said, it would be Timeo Dominum transeuntem: I fear the Lord is passing me by."   To him it meant, pay attention and always remember that you can never know from which direction or in which form the Lord may appear.  He encouraged me to think this way too, and, even as a broadcaster, I tried not just to rely on what I already knew but also to keep my ears open.  Consequently, I was obedient when Nathan Loewen, a young man I met a conference at McGill, told me that I really ought to come back to Montreal later that year in order to meet and listen to Richard Kearney, an Irish philosopher of religion, who would be addressing a regional meeting of the American Academy of Religion that Nathan was involved in organizing.  This proved a very happy chance and eventually opened up a whole new line of thinking for me.  I liked Kearney's talk as much as Nathan had thought I would, and, when we talked afterwards, I found him receptive to the idea of our spending a couple of days in recorded conversation with a view to producing a series for Ideas on his work.  I read my way into his writings, particularly the trilogy he had recently completed  - The God Who May Be (2001), On Stories (2002), and Strangers, Gods an Monsters (2003) - and later that year I headed for his home in suburban Boston, where he teaches at Boston College.  The interviews were a success, and The God Who May Be was broadcasts on Ideas in three parts in early 2006...  

"If I had to choose a sentence from the Old Testament for my blazon," my old friend and teacher Ivan Illich once said, it would be Timeo Dominum transeuntem: I fear the Lord is passing me by."   To him it meant, pay attention and always remember that you can never know from which direction or in which form the Lord may appear.  He encouraged me to think this way too, and, even as a broadcaster, I tried not just to rely on what I already knew but also to keep my ears open.  Consequently, I was obedient when Nathan Loewen, a young man I met a conference at McGill, told me that I really ought to come back to Montreal later that year in order to meet and listen to Richard Kearney, an Irish philosopher of religion, who would be addressing a regional meeting of the American Academy of Religion that Nathan was involved in organizing.  This proved a very happy chance and eventually opened up a whole new line of thinking for me.  I liked Kearney's talk as much as Nathan had thought I would, and, when we talked afterwards, I found him receptive to the idea of our spending a couple of days in recorded conversation with a view to producing a series for Ideas on his work.  I read my way into his writings, particularly the trilogy he had recently completed  - The God Who May Be (2001), On Stories (2002), and Strangers, Gods an Monsters (2003) - and later that year I headed for his home in suburban Boston, where he teaches at Boston College.  The interviews were a success, and The God Who May Be was broadcasts on Ideas in three parts in early 2006...