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Something Understood

Religion & Ethics

Ethical and religious discussion that examines some of the larger questions of life

Ethical and religious discussion that examines some of the larger questions of life, taking a spiritual theme and exploring it through music, prose and poetry

BBC Radio 4 FM

Something Understood: Learning and the Reasons of the Heart

Learning and the Reasons of the Heart

BBC Radio 4 - Something Understood, Learning and the Reasons of the Heart

Theologian Jane Williams examines the relationship between learning and language.

Theologian Jane Williams examines the relationship between learning and language and the tension between what the heart knows and what we can articulate.

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


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