Ligature - that which ties you
The things that bind us are many and varied. Ties to family, to culture, to faith and to conviction keep us upright and braced against the vagaries of fate. Equally, however, our ties may hold us fast and prevent us from moving with the times even when change would be for the best. Many years ago (I find myself writing that line more and more), my friend Peter Lenten and I designed a social studies unit on religion. For years we had been taking students to visit a mosque and a church and a synagogue. It occurred to us that, whilst these were important places for our students to keep visiting, few of our students would feel any personal connection with these religions. In fact, in a largely secular school, few of our students had much of a tie to conventional religion at all. Peter had studied divinity many years before my many-years-ago and he explained that one etymology of the word "religion" is from the same Latin root as "ligature": historically "reli...