People | James Woodward

Back to my Roots? The legacy of Brooke Foss Westcott

28 December 2018 James Woodward Comments 0 Comment

I finished reading Isabel Hardman on turned to thoroughly researched life of Westcott. There were many resonances and connections. As the son of a miner the title was arresting. Ordained in Durham after theological studies at Westcott House Cambridge there were further connections. I have a copy of his commentaries on Hebrews and St Johns Gospel and am in awe of this great mans scholarship, though his style of prose makes its demand on the reader ! Graham Patricks attention to…

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Reminiscence Work with Older Adults

25 March 2018 James Woodward Comments 0 Comment

The Multi-Sensory Reminiscence Activity Book 52 Weekly Group Session Plans for Working with Older Adults Sophie Jopling and Sarah Mousley Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2017 ISBN: 9781785922398 There are few of us in early middle age who do not know someone who is living with some of the opportunities and challenges of growing older. Sadly for some of our loved ones this includes a significant amount of confusion and memory loss caused by dementia -related illness. Jessica Kingsley continues its…

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Holiday reading (1) Gordon Brown My life, Our Times Bodley Head 2017.

6 January 2018 James Woodward Comments 0 Comment

Having successfully downsized my living and therefore ‘storage’ arrangements I think twice about buying a book! I was, however, immediately drawn to this political autobiography, not least because on the two occasions I met Gordon Brown I found him humane, reflective and generous. Retired politicians, we are told, are generally more attractive than practising ones because possibly they can no longer do any harm. This is a life meticulously well written with a careful attention to detail. There…

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Please pray for me

10 December 2017 James Woodward Comments 0 Comment

As a priest, I should not be surprised at how often sometimes perfect strangers ask me to pray for them. Sometimes it is related to a specific difficulty or crisis – more often than not people understandably take comfort from the reality of being prayed for. Intercession, prayer that is to ask God for something or somebody, is a very complex reality and problem. Intercessory prayer centres on prayers of asking, but God is not insensitive, deaf or unyielding,…

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Longing for a deeper Church ?

16 July 2016 James Woodward Comments 0 Comment

Andrew Walker, Notes From A Wayward Son: A Miscellany, ed. by Andrew D. Kinsey (Cascade, 2015), 322pp. no price marked. ISBN 978 – 1– 62564 – 161 – 8. This is an intriguing, stimulating and rewarding book that offers a space within which Andrew Walkers rather original and distinctive voice can be heard. Some will know Walker through his groundbreaking study of the 1970s and 80s house church movement Restoring the Kingdom (Guildford Eagle, 1998). Others will have been influenced…

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Jim Birren

15 February 2016 James Woodward Comments 0 Comment

REMEMBERING JIM BIRREN One of the towering figures in gerontology has died : James E. Birren, founding Director of the Andrus Gerontology Center, at the University of Southern California, died at the age of 97. His achievements were extraordinary Foremost among these, is creation of the Andrus Gerontology Center at USC, as well as the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. His books and other publications are extensive, and many distinguished gerontologists have been nurtured by Jim Birren. To get just a…

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The Look

4 July 2015 James Woodward Comments 0 Comment

the look “The World is not something to look at, it is something to be in.” Mark Rudman I look and look. Looking’s a way of being: one becomes, sometimes, a pair of eyes walking. Walking wherever looking takes one. The eyes dig and burrow into the world. They touch fanfare, howl, madrigal, clamor. World and the past of it, not only visible present, solid and shadow that looks at one looking. And language? Rhythms of echo and interruption?…

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What is Age?

3 July 2015 James Woodward Comments 0 Comment

“Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age… We who are old know that age is more than a disability. It is an intense and varied experience, almost beyond our capacity at times, but something to be carried high.” -Florida Scott-Maxwell, The Measure of My Days

understanding people ?

17 June 2015 James Woodward Comments 1 Comment

Affinity Consider this man in the field beneath, Gaitered with mud, lost in his own breath, Without joy, without sorrow,… Without children, without wife, Stumbling insensitively from furrow to furrow, A vague somnambulist; but hold your tears, For his name also is written in the Book of Life. Ransack your brainbox, pull out the drawers That rot in your heart’s dust, and what have you to give To enrich his spirit or the way he lives? From the standpoint of…

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Memories

2 June 2014 James Woodward Comments 0 Comment

We, unaccustomed to courage exiles from delight live coiled in shells of loneliness until love leaves its high holy temple and comes into our sight to liberate us into life. Love arrives and in its train come ecstasies old memories of pleasure ancient histories of pain. Yet if we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls. We are weaned from our timidity In the flush of love’s light we dare be brave…

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Remembering Maya Angelou

29 May 2014 James Woodward Comments 0 Comment

I started my blogging life in 2008 partly as a way of capturing my experience of a sabbatical in America. In the spring of that year I spent a month in Washington DC followed by three months in Chicago. It was a rejuvenating and very significant time. I managed to get over to Washington for the annual American Society of Ageing conference and here is my blog from that day. I kept the rather incidental comments about the conference and…

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A Tree….

28 May 2014 James Woodward Comments 0 Comment

a tree telling of Orpheus he spoke, and as no tree listens I listened, and language came into my roots out of the earth, into my bark out of the air, into the pores of my greenest shoots gently as dew and there was no word he sang but I knew its meaning. He told me of journeys, of where sun and moon go while we stand in dark, of an earth-journey he dreamed he would take some…

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bouquet, sunlight

19 August 2013 James Woodward Comments 0 Comment

Our sense of these things changes and they change, Not as in metaphor, but in our sense Of them. So sense exceeds all metaphor. It exceeds the heavy changes of the light. It is like a flow of meanings with no speech And of as many meanings as of men. We are two that use these roses as we are, In seeing them. This is what makes them seem So far beyond the rhetorician’s touch. Wallace…

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The Reverend Jeremy Sampson

20 July 2013 James Woodward Comments 1 Comment

(from The Church Times Obits) SAMPSON. – On 11 July, the Revd Jeremy John Egerton Sampson: Vicar of North Perak, Malaya (1951-52); Priest-in-Charge of Johore Bahru (1952-57); Vicar of St John the Divine, Ipoh (1957-62); Killingworth (1962-76); Consett (1976-90); Rural Dean of Lanchester (1980-85); aged 89. It was with a mixture of sadness and gratitude that I learnt about Jeremy’s death this week. Jeremy was my first Vicar or training incumbent when I was ordained to a title in the Durham Diocese in 1985….

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Alastair Campbell

27 August 2012 James Woodward Comments 0 Comment

If anyone has any doubt about the sheer complexity and difficulty of the work of a modern-day Prime Minister then this book and all 730 pages of it should dispel any lingering lack of understanding! It takes us into the heart of the work of government, the handling of the press, the management of a political party and the holding together of complex personalities and egos of politicians, their ambitions and their fantasies. It is the fourth in a series…

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Befriending Strangers?

24 February 2012 James Woodward Comments 0 Comment

During Lent we should recall the challenge of Jesus to welcome and pay attention to the stranger. This was at the heart of Jesus’ ministry because it is at the heart of God’s relationship to creation. The stranger represents the one different to us. The Pharisees sought to establish a Jewish comfort zone beyond which strangers were kept. Rhetorically it was about equating God’s hospitable space with a carefully delineated expression of the Torah. Jesus welcomed the latter into God’s…

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The seven deadly sins CEOs won’t admit

1 July 2011 James Woodward Comments 0 Comment

It’s a classic job interview question: “What are your strengths and weaknesses?” At the top of the business world, people seem to have taken to heart the advice to admit no negative traits, just positives in disguise, says Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times. Every week for the past year and a half, the Financial Times has asked business leaders 20 questions including: “What are your three worst features?” Here are the findings: CEO Sins They are: Control freaks Vain…

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AM I NO LONGER YOUNG?

7 May 2011 James Woodward Comments 0 Comment

Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me Keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished. -Mary Oliver

Growing Older?

1 March 2011 James Woodward Comments 0 Comment

The first fifty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it. -Arthur Schopenhauer