• It Is Through The Face That We Encounter God
• A Message of Hope
• Waiting
• An Octopus at Easter.
• Invite relationships
• Transformation
• This Moment
• A Good Story
• Can I Be A Healer?
• The virtue of doubt
• Mary Mackillop, Woman Of Faith
• Fridge Doors And The Rest Of The World
• Entertaining Angels
• More connected than ever, more disconnected than ever
• Feast of Teresa of Avila, 15th October
• The Witness of Maternity Leave
• Something New
• Farewell
• Australian Catholic University is a Public University Open to All
• What if God Was One of Us?
• Zest for life
• Attendance
• Christmas Angel Tree
• A Present For Me
• On being famous
• Reason To Celebrate
• World Youth Day
• May the evening's twilight find me gentle still
• Goodness: God’s Gift To Us
• A time for every purpose under heaven
• The Mad Dash
• The Positive Spirit is Fully Alive
• Its time to change
• Living an Abundant Life

There are three questions I like to employ in my teaching:

• Critical – Why is this so? Why are things this way, rather than another way?
• Appreciative – What is good here? What do I need to know or understand more deeply?
• Imaginative – What if? What if things were different? What new possibilities await?

It is the second question that I find requires the most work or attention. Students are not accustomed to it. They have been too well-schooled, through years of education, to be critical thinkers.

Most of us are products of the age of enlightenment, of critical reasoning and autonomous thought. There is no question that we need a critical consciousness. Yet have we neglected to also develop an appreciative consciousness?

This is my thought for the week, maybe even for my whole life. To seek the good. To appreciate the good. To find the good, even and especially when I am prone to only seeing the negative, failing to realize that there is goodness in everything. “Lift up your hearts,” the Catholic Mass says.

“It is right to give God thanks and praise.”

Goodness is everywhere to be found. It is God’s gift to us. Yet we need an appreciative consciousness to open us to this goodness. This is not naïveté or rosy-coloured romanticism. It requires much faith and a divinely attentive life to see the good. I would even say, before you engage in critical inquiry, engage first in appreciative inquiry.

Nothing that exists can be entirely evil. This is a classic insight so characteristic of Catholicism. It allows us to discern goodness, to “draw out” goodness, to affirm and to “lift up,” to lighten each other’s loads, to live appreciatively, to give thanks.

• Terry Veling
• Theology,
• Brisbane