Welcoming Principal Quotes

True translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal. One reads and rereads the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them to reach, to touch, the vision or experience that prompted them. One then gathers up what one has found there and takes this quivering almost wordless “thing” and places it behind the language it needs to be translated into. And now the principal task is to persuade the host language to take in and welcome the “thing” that is waiting to be articulated.

If we want to build schools where parents and teachers are fighting to get in instead of out, we must make developing positive school cultures a priority for every school and principal that welcomes children each day.

We read and reread the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them, to reach, to touch the vision or experience which prompted them. We then gather up what we have found there and take this quivering almost wordless 'thing' and place it behind the language into which it needs to be translated. And now the principal task is to persuade the host language to take in and welcome the 'thing' which is waiting to be articulated.

...we must be careful to avoid the error of reductionism, as if the whole of the Spirit’s ministry can be reduced to Christology, as if the Spirit does nothing but glorify Christ. It’s the mistake of arguing that the primary purpose of the Spirit’s coming is the sole purpose of his coming. The principal aim of the Spirit in what he does is to awaken us to the glory, splendor, and centrality of the work of Christ Jesus. But this does not mean that it is less than the Spirit at work when he awakens us also to his own glory and power and abiding presence.

Prostitution clearly promotes the depersonalisation of sex, which can never be good news for women—any women. Prostitution has a ripple effect. It creates the illusory view in the minds of men that women are not human beings as men are, but simply the walking carrier of a product, and that they serve one principal function, whether or not they are paid for it, which is to be used as vessels for the sexual release of men. They are effortlessly and imperceptibly relegated from the realms of the human. They are not people on a par with their male counterparts. How could they be, when their principal function is as something to be fucked? Prostitution obscures women’s humanity from society generally, but it also causes women specifically to lose sensitivity to their own humanity by way of tolerating the prostitution of others of their gender. When women tolerate prostitution they are actually tolerating the dehumanisation of their own gender in a broader and more encompassing sense. Countries with male-majority governments are implementing the legalisation of prostitution with frightening rapidity throughout the western world. Where is the female revolt towards all this? There is no widespread female revolt because female sexuality has so long been viewed as a commodity that woman have begun to believe in the necessity of a separate class of women to provide it. If a woman tolerates this treatment of her fellow women, if she accepts it under the banner of ‘liberalism’ or anything else, then she must also accept that she herself is only removed from prostitution by lack of the circumstances necessary to place her there. Should these circumstances ever occur, her body, too, would be just as welcome for mauling, sucking and fucking by the clients of the brothels and would be just as reviled by the men who are on the look-out for a wife. The acceptance of prostitution makes all women potential prostitutes in the public view since there are only two requirements for a woman to work in a brothel: one is that circumstance has placed her so (and who knows when that can happen, to any of us?) and the other is that she has a vagina, and all women are born meeting at least one of these requirements. It bears repeating: if the commodification of women is to be accepted then all women fall under that potential remit. If a woman accepts prostitution in society, then she accepts this personal indenture, whether she knows it or not; and yes, that is a loss. As

Alfred Wight gained admission to Glasgow Veterinary College in 1933 with passes in English, French and Latin – hardly ideal subjects for a future scientist, but the situation then was very different. With comparatively few wishing to enter the veterinary profession during the years of the depression, the veterinary schools were only too pleased to welcome anyone to fill the courses. While still at Hillhead School, he had telephoned the veterinary college to tell them that, provided he gained the basic entry requirements, he would like to pursue a career in veterinary medicine. The principal himself, Dr Whitehouse, had answered the telephone. ‘Good!’ he had replied. ‘When can you start?

It was December 15, 2012, the day after twenty-year-old Adam Lanza fatally shot twenty children between six and seven years old, as well as six adult staff members, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. I remember thinking, Maybe if all the mothers in the world crawled on their hands and knees toward those parents in Newtown, we could take some of the pain away. We could spread their pain across all of our hearts. I would do it. Can’t we find a way to hold some of it for them? I’ll take my share. Even if it adds sadness to all my days. My friends and I didn’t rush to start a fund that day. We didn’t storm the principal’s office at our kids’ school asking for increased security measures. We didn’t call politicians or post on Facebook. We would do all that in the days to come. But the day right after the shooting, we just sat together with nothing but the sound of occasional weeping cutting through the silence. Leaning in to our shared pain and fear comforted us. Being alone in the midst of a widely reported trauma, watching endless hours of twenty-four-hour news or reading countless articles on the Internet, is the quickest way for anxiety and fear to tiptoe into your heart and plant their roots of secondary trauma. That day after the mass killing, I chose to cry with my friends, then I headed to church to cry with strangers. I couldn’t have known then that in 2017 I would speak at a fund-raiser for the Resiliency Center of Newtown and spend time sitting with a group of parents whose children were killed at Sandy Hook. What I’ve learned through my work and what I heard that night in Newtown makes one thing clear: Not enough of us know how to sit in pain with others. Worse, our discomfort shows up in ways that can hurt people and reinforce their own isolation. I have started to believe that crying with strangers in person could save the world. Today there’s a sign that welcomes you to Newtown: WE ARE SANDY HOOK. WE CHOOSE LOVE. That day when I sat in a room with other mothers from my neighborhood and cried, I wasn’t sure what we were doing or why. Today I’m pretty sure we were choosing love in our own small way.

It’s not the task of the church to “Make America Great Again.” The contemporary task of the church is to make Christianity countercultural again. And once we untether Jesus from the interests of empire, we begin to see just how countercultural and radical Jesus’ ideas actually are. Enemies? Love them. Violence? Renounce it. Money? Share it. Foreigners? Welcome them. Sinners? Forgive them. These are the kind of radical ideas that will always be opposed by the principalities and powers, but which the followers of Jesus are called to embrace, announce, and enact. And the degree to which the church is faithful to Jesus and his radical ideas is the degree to which the church embodies a faith that is truly countercultural.

It is common to assume that multi-racialism is inevitable, and that racial identity will disappear as races mix. Americans prefer to think that the “tragic mulatto,” welcome in neither community, was either a myth or a reflection of outmoded racist thinking. Research suggests things may not be so simple. A 2003 study of 90,000 middle-school and high-school students found that black/white mixed-race children had more health and psychological problems than children who were either black or white. They were more likely to be depressed, sleep badly, skip school, smoke, drink, consider suicide, and have sex. White/Asian children showed similar symptoms. The principal author concluded that the cause was “the struggle with identity formation, leading to lack of self-esteem, social isolation and problems of family dynamics in biracial households.” The authors of a 2008 study reached the same conclusion: “When it comes to engaging in risky/anti-social adolescent behavior, however, mixed race adolescents are stark outliers compared to both blacks and whites. . . . Mixed race adolescents—not having a natural peer group—need to engage in more risky behaviors to be accepted.” A study of white/Asian children found that they were twice as likely as mono-racial children—34 percent vs. 17 percent—to suffer from psychological disorders such as anxiety, depression or drug abuse. Yoonsun Choi of the University of Chicago found that in Seattle middle schools, a clear racial identity seemed to protect against certain problems. Bi-racial children were the group most likely to smoke, take drugs, have been in fights, hurt someone badly, or carry a gun. Prof. Choi believes mixed-race children suffer because no racial group accepts them. “There is some indication that a strong ethnic identity helps protect kids from these [undesirable] behaviors,” she said.

president, Kerry, Moniz, Sherman, and many others, we obtained more than the necessary support. The congressional review period expired without a vote of disapproval. The deal was done! The Iran agreement is proof of the value of tough sanctions, when combined with skillful, relentless diplomacy, to accomplish the seemingly unachievable in international affairs. The JCPOA was a finely detailed agreement that effectively closed all pathways to Iran developing a nuclear weapon and ensured Iran would face the most rigorous, intrusive international inspections regime ever established. It was never able, nor was it intended, to halt all of Iran’s nefarious behavior—its support for terrorism, its destabilization of neighboring states, its hostility toward Israel, or its ballistic missile program. Still, it effectively addressed our biggest concern and that of the international community—preventing Iran from posing a far more dangerous threat to the region and the world through its acquisition of nuclear weapons. Understandably, Israel always said it viewed Iran’s nuclear program as an existential threat. So, surely, the removal of that threat would be welcome news to Israel, our Gulf partners, and their backers. In reality, we discovered that removing the nuclear threat was not in fact their principal motivation. Rather, Israel and the Gulf Arab countries aimed to put permanent and crippling economic and military pressure on Iran such that either the regime collapsed, or it was too weak to wield meaningful influence in the region. The nuclear deal, which allowed Iran to access much of its own frozen assets held abroad under sanctions, in exchange for full and verifiable compliance with the terms of the agreement, was deemed worse than no deal at all by those who prioritized keeping the international community’s boot on Iran’s neck above halting its

In the course of history, kings have welcomed more and more people to their courts, which became more and more brilliant. Is it not obvious that these courtiers and the "officers" were stolen from the feudal lords, who just lost at one fell swoop, their retinues and their administrators? The modern state nourishes a vast bureaucracy. Is not the corresponding decline in the staff of the employer patent to all? Putting the mass of the people to productive work makes possible at any given moment of technical advance the existence of a given number of non-producers. These non-producers will either be dispersed in a number of packets or concentrated in one immense body, according as the profits of productive work accrue to the social or to the political authorities. The requirement of Power, its tendency and its raison d'etre, is to concentrate them in its own service. To this task, it brings us so much ardour, instinctive rather than designed that in course of time it does to a natural death the social order which gave it birth. This tendency is due not to the form taken by any particular state but to the inner essence of Power, which is the inevitable assailant of the social authorities and sucks the very lifeblood. And the more vigorous a particular power is a more virile it is to the role of vampire. When it falls to weak hand, which gives aristocratic resistance a chance to organize itself, the state's revolutionary nature becomes for the time being effaced. This happens either because the forces of aristocracy opposed to the now enfeebled statocratic onslaught a barrier capable of checking it, or, more frequently, because they put a guard on their assailant, by laying hands on the apparatus which endangers them; they guarantee their own survival by installing themselves in the seat of government. This is exactly what did happen to the two epochs when the ideas of Montesquieu and Marx took shape. The counter-offensive of the social authorities cannot be understood unless it is realized that the process of destroying aristocracy goes hand in hand with a tendency in the opposite sense. The mighty are put down - if they are independent of the state; but simultaneously, a statocrcy is exalted, and the new statocrats do more than lay a collective hand on the social forces - they laid them on the lay them each his own hand; in this way, they divert them from Power and restore them again to society, in which thereafter the statocrats join forces, by reason of the similarity of their situations and interests, with the ancient aristocracies in retreat. Moreover, the statocratic acids, in so far as they break down the aristocratic molecules, do not make away with all the forces which they liberate. Part of them stays unappropriated, and furnishes new captains of society with the personnel necessary to the construction of new principates. In this way, the fission of the feudal cell at the height of the Middle Ages released the labour on which the merchant-drapers rose to wealth and political importance. So also in England, with a greed of Henry VIII had fallen on the ecclesiastical authorities to get from their wealth, the wherewithal to carry out his policies, the greater part of the monastic spoils, stuck to the fingers of hands, which had been held out to receive them. These spoils founded the fortunes of the nascent English capitalism. In this way, new hives are forever being built, in which lie hidden a new sort of energies; these will in time inspire the state to fresh orgies of covetousness. That is why the statocratic aggression seemed never to reach its logical conclusion - the complete atomization of society, which should contain henceforward nothing but isolated individuals whom the state alone rules and exploits.

I want the building to be welcoming, but I don’t want to pretend nothing happened. I want us to move on, but I don’t want us to forget. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to do all that. When I was training to be a principal, the biggest threat we could imagine was an earthquake. They certainly hadn’t started the duck-and-run drills in the L.A. schools for drive-by shootings. Nor had they ever envisioned that schools would become war zones for rival gangs and street disputes. Now we have teachers and students dying in the halls. Small towns, big towns, black, white, upper class, lower class—it doesn’t seem to matter. And the human in me wants to rail against that, wants to live in denial, while the principal in me knows I can’t do that. I have an obligation to my students. If this is the world we live in, then this is the world I must prepare them for. But how do I do that? I’m not sure I’m prepared for this world. I know Miss Avalon wasn’t.

Welcomed by the English, Jews from all over the New World shed their converso cloaks and emigrated to Jamaica. The community soon included shipowners from Mexico and Brazil, traders from Peru and Colombia, and ship captains and pilots from Nevis and Barbados. Together their knowledge of New World trade was unsurpassed. By 1660, Jamaica had become the Jews’ principal haven in the New World. Unlike the small, isolated isles in the eastern Caribbean, Jamaica was a major island in the middle of the shipping lanes, an ideal base from which to strike at Spanish shipping,

spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?" Hebrews 1:14 Angels are the unseen attendants of the saints of God; they bear us up in their hands, lest we dash our foot against a stone. Loyalty to their Lord leads them to take a deep interest in the children of his love; they rejoice over the return of the prodigal to his father's house below, and they welcome the advent of the believer to the King's palace above. In olden times the sons of God were favoured with their visible appearance, and at this day, although unseen by us, heaven is still opened, and the angels of God ascend and descend upon the Son of man, that they may visit the heirs of salvation. Seraphim still fly with live coals from off the altar to touch the lips of men greatly beloved. If our eyes could be opened, we should see horses of fire and chariots of fire about the servants of the Lord; for we have come to an innumerable company of angels, who are all watchers and protectors of the seed-royal. Spenser's line is no poetic fiction, where he sings-- "How oft do they with golden pinions cleave The flitting skies, like flying pursuivant Against foul fiends to aid us militant!" To what dignity are the chosen elevated when the brilliant courtiers of heaven become their willing servitors! Into what communion are we raised since we have intercourse with spotless celestials! How well are we defended since all the twenty- thousand chariots of God are armed for our deliverance! To whom do we owe all this? Let the Lord Jesus Christ be forever endeared to us, for through him we are made to sit in heavenly places far above principalities and powers.

1. As the Industrial Revolution proceeded, modern society created for itself a self-congratulatory myth, the myth of “progress”: From the time of our remote, ape-like ancestors, human history had been an unremitting march toward a better and brighter future, with everyone joyously welcoming each new technological advance: animal husbandry, agriculture, the wheel, the construction of cities, the invention of writing and of money, sailing ships, the compass, gunpowder, the printing press, the steam engine, and, at last, the crowning human achievement—modern industrial society! Prior to industrialization, nearly everyone was condemned to a miserable life of constant, backbreaking labor, malnutrition, disease, and an early death. Aren’t we so lucky that we live in modern times and have lots of leisure and an array of technological conveniences to make our lives easy? Today I think there are relatively few thoughtful, honest and well-informed people who still believe in this myth. To lose one’s faith in “progress” one has only to look around and see the devastation of our environment, the spread of nuclear weapons, the excessive frequency of depression, anxiety disorders and psychological stress, the spiritual emptiness of a society that nourishes itself principally with television and computer games…one could go on and on.

The Blasphemy of Reason To understand the relationship between Islamic and scientific modes of thought, it's useful to contrast the emergence of Islam with that of Christianity. In its first four centuries, Christianity germinated gradually within the Roman Empire, with many of its leading theologians converting to the new religion only after having spent their formative years immersed in the classical learning of ancient Greece. Islam, by contrast, spread through military conquest, expanding mostly through conversion of conquered peoples. As a result, even when Muslim rulers welcomed classical Greek knowledge, it was perceived as something alien. Tellingly, Greek science and natural philosophy were known throughout Islam as the “foreign sciences,” in contrast to the “Islamic sciences,” such as the study of the Quran, which were considered to hold the highest place in Muslim life.9 In the early years of Islamic civilization, various groups vigorously competed for the hearts and minds of the Muslim community. Those who actively pursued the Greek classical tradition of knowledge were known as the faylasuf or “philosophers.” Another group, taking a more mystical approach to Islam, were the Sufis. However, the two principal groups that emerged were the Ash'arites, traditionalists who believed in the primacy of Islamic faith, and the Mu'tazilites, who believed in a rational explication of the Quran.10 The Mu'tazilites were devout followers of Islam, while applying rational thought to their interpretation of theology. When passages in the Quran referred to “the face of God” or described God sitting on his throne, the Mu'tazilites argued that these descriptions should be interpreted metaphorically. It seemed to them equally valid to use reason as theology to make important distinctions in their lives, such as between good and evil. The Ash'arites, on the other hand, based their viewpoint on the fundamental presumption that the Quran was the direct word of God transmitted through Muhammad. As such, they viewed the Quran as something eternal and uncreated, an indivisible part of God: it wasn't just the word of God; it literally was God. How, then, to interpret statements about God's face or God sitting on his throne? The Ash'arite position was to take these statements literally, and if reason were unable