cross my heart

Couldn't find any of this online, but it's a lovely cd. If you live in Lahore I can make a copy for you.

In a discussion with a colleague yesterday: what counts as a cross-listed course? Is there a set of criteria -perhaps not rigorous or definitive, but something on which one might base one's judgement?

One idea is that you run courses together, simultaneously, hoping students themselves will make the leap across the divide, see and make connections themselves? This, the 'pillar model', seems to expect too much of students in my opinion. And you can really only make that leap when you're on a sure footing yourself. Since most of us are blind to our habitual ways of thinking, and are only reminded of them once we've left them-like an exile from his homeland-then, and only then do we really get a clearer picture of our assumptions, methodologies, aims, history, etc.

The other way of thinking about this is a real conversation, a dialogue within the course itself. The problems here are legion: who, today, has that type of inclination or, indeed, training, to cover such vast ground in anything but a superficial way?

What, exactly, is meant by the cross?

How can one enter another's territory, land, without knowing the required etiquette, the ways to approach the other? Not just the borders, or places where people and ideas overlap, but deep into the heart of the other? How do you open yourself up, make yourself available without losing yourself? The awe, the bewilderment, the utterly mysterious: like the face of the other, that you recognize but do not know. Somewhere, somewhere deep in you the stranger ceases to be a stranger...