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| Home » Writings, Speeches, Broadcasts » Credo » 2002 |
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| Listening is the Greatest Gift We Can Give to a Troubled Soul |
| 1/12/2002 |
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Viktor Frankl survived three years in the concentration camps of Dachau and Auschwitz. On the basis of his experiences there, he went on to found a new school of psychotherapy, Logotherapy, based on finding meaning in suffering.
Once he told the following story. A woman phoned him up in the middle of the night and calmly told him that she was about to commit suicide. Frankl kept her on the phone and talked her through her depression, giving her reason after reason to carry on living. E... |
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| Arguments are Won Only by Giving Your Opponents a Hearing |
| 1/11/2002 |
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One of the greatest nineteenth century historians, Lord Acton (the man who said "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely") had a glittering academic career. Awarded honorary doctorates by Cambridge (1888) and Oxford (1890), he founded the English Historical Review and became in 1895 Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. Yet he never earned an academic degree.
The reason was simple. He was a Catholic. In the mid-nineteenth century, Catholics were not adm... |
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| A Great Archbishop – and a Friend in Faith & Football |
| 1/10/2002 |
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Eleven and a half years ago I received a delightful invitation. Dr George Carey had just been elected Archbishop of Canterbury, I had just been chosen to be the next Chief Rabbi, and neither of us had yet taken up office. Someone discovered - how, I'm not sure - that we were both passionate Arsenal supporters. Would we like (he asked) our first ecumenical gathering to take place in his box at Highbury Stadium (a midweek match, of course, for religious reasons)? Enthusiastically, we both a... |
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| There is No Suffering from which Good Cannot Come |
| 1/9/2002 |
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An American friend told me a story about the great violinist Itzhak Perlman. Perlman suffered from polio as a child, and ever since has been in a wheelchair. On one occasion he was performing a violin concerto when, with an audible ping, one of the strings broke in the first movement. Everyone waited to see what he would do. With astonishing virtuosity, he continued as if nothing had happened, playing through to the finale using only the remaining three strings. The applause, as the conce... |
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