Quotes About Interpretation

The point of second naïveté is not to reach a position where one rejects academic debates but rather to provide a space in which readers can place these ongoing debates to one side so that they can attend to the transforming source of the text itself. It is this transforming source that we speak of when we speak of the Word of God.

For the Word, if it exists at all, does not simply dwell in the ink that marks the pages of the Bible and cannot be isolated in a dissection of the story into its constituent parts.

What is important about revelation is not that we seek to interpret it in the same way but rather that we all love it and are transformed by it. To fail to recognize this would be similar to an art critic saying that what is important when considering a piece of art is that we interpret it correctly rather than loving it and being challenged by it.

For just as one person's idol is another's icon, so one person's fable is another's parable.

In short, the emerging conversation is in a unique place to acknowledge the long-forgotten insight that God hides in God's visibility, realizing that revelation embraces concealment at one and the same time as it embraces manifestation and that our various interpretations of revelation will always be provisional, fragile and fragmentary.

Parables subvert this desire to make faith simple and understandable. They do not offer the reader clarity, for they refuse to be captured in the net of a single interpretation and instead demand our eternal return to their words, our wrestling with them, and our puzzling over them.

In contrast, parables represent a mode of communicating that cannot be heard without being heeded, in which the only evidence of having "heard" its message is in the fleshly incarnation of that message.

When the truth affirmed by Christianity is thought of as constituting a series of factual claims open to being assessed by intellectual experts, Christianity opens itself up to a corrosive form of doubt that threatens to destroy it. Later I shall be exploring the deep importance of doubt in the life of faith. However, this importance can only be understood if we think of the truth affirmed by Christianity in a way that is freed from the realm of objectivity.

Something I worry about a lot when I write, that I'm less worried about with a computer, is about the ways in which English is ambiguous. I'm constantly worrying about ways in which the reader might misinterpret what I've written. So I've actually spent a lot of time consciously crafting the mechanics of my prose style to use constructions that are less likely to be misinterpreted.

I always wish people would comment more, though the thing that makes me cringe is when the comment is the name of the function rephrased. Function's called push_stack and the comment says, "This pushes to the stack." Thank you.

Moore's law doesn't apply to batteries. So how much time we're wasting in interpreting stuff really matters there. The cycles count.

You have your words, and I have mine.

Sin embargo, dado que entre intelectuales nunca creo en "malentendidos" (esto es diferente en el caso de las personas ingenuas), sino que sistemáticamente parto de lecturas falsas intencionales, es decir, de reflejos condicionados de segundo grado, me parece razonable investigar los motivos de las interpretaciones erróneas evidentes. Por el momento, me limito al caso de Münkler

The beautiful in its pure form can safely be left to the idealists, while the half-beautiful and the ugly occupy empiricists.

Further, for once, I like the idea that people who think I'm a constant voice for the furthering of the imagination have to see that interest in a more materialistic fashion.

Glück malt man mit Punkten, Unglück mit Strichen", sagte sie. "Du musst, wenn du unser Glück beschreiben willst, ganz viele kleine Punkte machen wie Seurat. Und dass es Glück war, wird man erst aus der Distanz sehen.

Beautiful landscapes are no use for good paintings.

Rarely can they claim to be simply a mirror of events. Like eyewitness reports, images deliver an interpretation of an event from a specific perspective: subjective, sometimes partisan, sometimes manipulative. Anyone who believes a photograph captures "reality" is naïve. Why a picture was taken, who distributed it, what their intention was - these questions must be asked again and again. Photographs can only speak to us only after we have mistrusted and challenged them.

David," I said, "no matter what my intentions are, everything I write winds up turning into fiction, including my letters to friends.

Critics search for ages for the wrong word, which, to give them credit, they eventually find.

Finally, for research like this, the quality of the translators is crucial. Kirundi is a language of allusion and proverbs: information is conveyed between the lines, hinted at, but rarely expressed directly. The challenge is also social: the translator is the front-line person who interacts with the interviewees, making the connection, maintaining the social aspects of the relation, putting people at ease.

Let us always remember Abraham Lincoln's undeservedly neglected riddle: How many legs has a dog got if you call a tail a leg? The answer, said Lincoln, and he was right, is four, because calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one.

People put a lot less effort into picking apart evidence that confirms what they already believe.

You can't turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something.