James Martin
The latter half of the twentieth century saw rapid expansion in computing and information technology, as practitioners worked to make sense of an industry transforming nearly every aspect of modern life. James Martin, born on 19 October 1933 in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, emerged from that period as a figure who worked across several of its dimensions simultaneously.
Martin was a United Kingdom citizen who was educated at Keble College and Rhodes University. He worked in a range of professional capacities — as a computer scientist, engineer, consultant, writer, screenwriter, and businessperson — writing in the English language throughout his career. This breadth of activity placed him at intersections that more narrowly defined practitioners did not typically occupy, allowing him to engage with computing both as a technical discipline and as a field with practical business and communicative dimensions.
Martin received the Turing Talk, a recognition associated with the computing field, which stands as a concrete marker of his standing among peers in that profession. He died on 24 June 2013 in Bermuda, having built a career that spanned the formative decades of the computing industry. His work as a consultant and writer, conducted alongside his technical and engineering roles, reflects the range of ways in which he engaged with the field over the course of his professional life.
Quotes by James Martin
But Jesus accepts what we give, blesses it, breaks it open, and magnifies it. Often in ways that we don’t see or cannot see. Or will not be able to see in this lifetime. Who knows what a kind word does? Who knows what a single act of charity will do? Sometimes the smallest word or gesture can change a life.
Paradoxically, admitting your own powerlessness can free you from the need to fix everything and allow us to be truly present to the other person, and to listen. A cartoon in The New Yorker had one woman saying testily to her friend, ‘There’s no point in our being friends if you won’t let me fix you.
Overall, being spiritual and being religious are both part of being in relationship with God. Neither can be fully realized without the other. Religion without spirituality can become a dry list of dogmatic statements divorced from the life of the spirit. This is what Jesus warned against. Spirituality without religion can become a self-centered complacency divorced from the wisdom of a community. That’s what I’m warning against. For St. Ignatius.
The problem was that whenever I considered “earning a living,” I thought mostly about the “earning” and nothing about the “living.
Religion can provide a check to my tendency to think that I am the center of the universe, that I know better than anyone about God, and that God speaks most clearly through me.
This is the greatest challenge of faith, says Polish, “to live with a God we cannot fully understand, whose actions we explain at our own peril.