Search Results: engagement

Just as the title says!

By traditional I mean a diamond engagement ring. Non-traditional meaning another stone other than diamond.

Ladies, which would you rather receive/have you received?
Guys, which would you rather buy/give to your lady?

I'm trying to get into this thing that can be compared to church camp.
I won't get any money for the work I do there, I don't have any influence over the work I'll do there either.
The form of application is four pages long and accompanied by a 12 page guide.

Here are some of the questions:
"Have you ever engaged in homosexual relations? If yes, why?"
"Do you listen to music inappropriate for a Christian?"
"Are you planning to get married?"
"If you've ever taken drugs, what effect does this still have on you today?"
"Have you consumed pornography in the last year?"
"Are you able to maintain your emotional stability?"

And then someone from your church has to describe your behaviour towards the other sex, your family, your mental and emotional stability and so on.

Is this tough process justified? I'm really worried they won't take me due to my family being fairly abusive and my community knowing that we don't treat each other well.
Also, my extracurriculars and personal, voluntary engagement in the community is below average, so I'm worried they won't take me.

These are just some examples I came up with. Feel free to write your own.

'Words' Ursula K. Le Guin
"Words transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy, emotion and understanding back and forth and amplify it. But what happens in a cultural ecosystem where the hearer has gone extinct and the speaker gone rampant? Where do transformation and understanding go?

What made James Baldwin and Margaret Mead’s superb 1970 dialogue about race and identity so powerful and enduringly insightful is the fact that it was a dialogue, not the ping-pong of opinions and co-reactivity that passes for dialogue today, but a commitment to mutual contemplation of viewpoints and considered response. That commitment is the reason they were able to address questions we continue to confront with tenfold more depth and nuance than we are capable of today. The dearth of this commitment in today is the reason we continue to find ourselves sundered by confrontation and paralyzed by the divisiveness of “us vs. them” narratives. “To bother to engage with problematic culture, and problematic people within culture is an act of love,” wrote poet Elizabeth Alexander in contemplating power and possibility. Krista Tippett calls such engagement generous listening. Yet so much of our communication today is defined by rather ungenerous unwillingness to listen coupled with a compulsion to speak.

The most perennially insightful and helpful remedy for this comes from legendary physicist David Bohm (1917–1992) 'On Dialogue' - a slim potent collection of essays and lectures from 1970-1980s exploring the alchemy of human communication, what is keeping us from listening to one another, and how we can transcend those barriers to mutual understanding.
“If we are to live in harmony with ourselves and nature, we need to be able to communicate freely in a creative movement in which no one permanently holds to or otherwise defends his own ideas.”

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/12/05/david-bohm-on-dialogue/