Walking the Talk

This article sets out to celebrate the lifetimes of John Mararo Gachoki (1948-2021), an educationist turned cleric and scholar. As a scholar, he employed oral techniques in theo-socio-scholarly discourses, and stands out as a narrating public theologian. Mararo-Gachoki who died after a motor accident on Monday evening, 3 May 2021, was a fine scholar with at least four major publications. In these publications, the article argues, he appealed to the power of memory in his socio-scholarly works. With oral history methods coming in form of autobiographies, biographies, festschrifts, memoirs, novels playbooks, satire, caricature, mimicry, oral speeches, and in literary works that mock certain unpleasant communal realities, Mararo-Gachoki’s publications are a clear demonstration that modern scholarship has to factor on oral discourses. In its methodology, this article analyses critical materials that are relevant in reconstructing the memory of Mararo-Gachoki, as we focus on his pet theme: Walk the talk. In our socio-scholarly world, how can we demonstrate the challenge of walking the talk? How did Mararo-Gachoki walk the talk, in his service to God and humanity, and how does it inform the twenty-first century? What vital lessons can we draw from his lifetimes?

Guided by joy to live and work with hearing loss

It was a Monday evening, about 8 years ago, when I entered my weekly yoga class tired and in a hurry. I let out a sigh of relief and wondered myself “why I don’t do this every day” \dots . With this thought a seed was planted. It took some time to grow, but now has blossomed successfully. This is my work transition story, which succeeded and for which I am very grateful.

“Mortally Wounded”

This chapter focuses on events following the death of Edna Phillips' younger sister Peggy in a plane crash. Not long after the Phillips family received the cable informing them of Peggy's death, the orchestra's personnel manager, Paul Lotz, who had already spoken with Stokowski, called Phillips. That Monday evening, the very next day, the orchestra was scheduled to play a concert that had the César Franck Symphony on the program, which the second harpist had not rehearsed with the orchestra. Stokowski asked Lotz to convey a message to Phillips for him. “As a man,” the maestro said, “I'd tell her not to play, but as an artist, she must if she possibly can. ” And so Phillips played the concert on Monday night. Although Edna's grief over Peggy was deep, her work in the orchestra couldn't be ignored. She had to go forward, and she did.

Electric Circus, Electric Ear and the Intermedia Center in Late-1960s New York

Composer Morton Subotnick moved to New York in 1966 for a brief but productive stay, establishing a small but notable electronic music studio affiliated with New York University. It was built around an early Buchla system and became Subotnick's personal workspace and a creative home for a cluster of emerging young composers. Subotnick also provided artistic direction for a new multimedia discoteque, the Electric Circus, an outgrowth of ideas he formulated earlier at the San Francisco Tape Music Center. A Monday evening series at the Circus, Electric Ear, helped spawn a cluster of venues for new music and multimedia. While the NYU studio and Electric Ear represent examples of centers operating outside commercial forces, the Electric Circus was entrepreneurial in nature, which ultimately compromised its artistic values.

Chapter XVI. Rachel Ray’s First Love-Letter

On the Monday evening, after tea, Mrs. Prime came out to the cottage. It was that Monday on which Mrs. Rowan and her daughter had left Baslehurst and had followed Luke up to London. She came out and sat with her mother and sister...

The Importance of ‘If’

Every week of term, on Wednesday afternoons, during most of his years at University College, Ayer held a seminar. Strangely, he makes no mention of that seminar in his autobiography, although it was a more serious and productive affair than his Monday evening seminar, which he does mention. At the Wednesday seminar, conditionals were often the subject for discussion. They are intriguing things in themselves but the attention they received must have been due, in large part, to their central role in Ayer's philosophy. Ayer was a phenomenalist, but he did not go so far as that prince of phenomenalists, George Berkeley, and assert that the things around us in space, chairs and tables, trees and rocks and lakes, the sun, moon and stars, were sensations, sensations of various kinds. Ayer's view was more that of John Stuart Mill, that these things were permanent possibilities of sensation. To assert the existence of a lake was to assert that if certain characteristic sensations occurred, then certain other characteristic sensations would follow. In that way, conditionals played a central role in Ayer's phenomenalism. That phenomenalism, however, needed to agree with an even more central element of his thought, the positivism he derived, perhaps from the philosophy of the Vienna Circle, perhaps from David Hume. According to that positivism, experience sets limits to understanding. If we can experience nothing but the presence or absence of sensations, then propositions concerning the presence or absence of sensations are all we can understand. Now a conditional concerning sensations does not imply the presence of sensations and, although it does imply the absence of sensations, it implies more besides. What Ayer's phenomenalism required, his positivism could not allow.

Béla Schick, 1877-1967, a Gracious Man

In his tenderly written eulogy in the February issue, Dr. Hodes calls attention to Dr. Schick's warmth and friendliness towards others. Although I was not a close personal friend, I was the recipient over the years of a number of neatly, hand-written letters from this great man. These letters always had a gracious tone reminiscent of a bygone era. An example of this is the following written to me in 1964 when Dr. Schick was in his eighty-seventh year: Oct. 23, 1964 I Just returned from Israel two days ago and found your kind letter of October 10th awaiting me. As much as I would like to attend your meeting Monday evening I feel that it will be impossible for me to do so at the present time.