Hello everyone, and welcome to Speaking with Joy, a podcast to fill your soul, challenge your mind,

and make you brave. I'm your host, Joy Clarkson, and an evangelist for all things good, true,

and beautiful. So make yourself a cup of tea, find, true, and beautiful.

So make yourself cup of tea, find somewhere comfortable, and let's dive in to this week's episode.

To be a human is to have a body, and to have a body is to touch and be touched. The silky softness of a dog's fur,

the grainy roughness of sand, the bracing coolness of water. There is the triumph of a high five,

the comfort of a bear hug, the lurching nervous magic of a kiss. There is the triumph of a high-five, the comfort of a bear hug, the lurching nervous magic of a kiss. There is pain, a slap to the face, a hand ripped out of our own.

Touch is safety, danger, pleasure, pain, comfort, courage, human.

We are touching creatures feeling our way through the world. To touch and be

touched is to be human. Well, hello everyone and welcome back to a brand new season of speaking

with joy. I can hardly believe that this is season three. When I began this, I was in my

very first year of writing my PhD dissertation, and now, as we begin this new season, I am supposedly

entering into my last. After a summer of travel and getting to meet many of you at my events in the

States, I am tucked back into

St. Andrews in Scotland, where I'm doing my PhD in Theology and the Arts. And I have been

dreaming and planning and plotting and scribbling in my commonplace book, dreaming of what I

could share with you all in this new season. That's why I'm so excited to dive

into this very first episode with you all, which deals with the theme of touch. In case you're

listening for the first time, the way this podcast always runs is that I pick a theme and I look at it

through the lens of something visual, something musical, and something

literary.

So this week, our literary example will be Gerrard Manley Hopkins' poem, God's grandeur.

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