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I don' t imagine that many people in the lovely Shropshire town of Ludlow would like the sound of a recording of a male voice choir singing Cwm Rhondda being defiantly blasted at them 24 hours a day across the Welsh border. But it was a real rather than imaginary audio onslaught which North Korean border dwellers had to endure recently when they became the victims of propagandist ditties being blasted at them from the south. I suppose the intention of this bogus broadcast was not so much to educate, inform and entertain, as to annoy and try to persuade the northern adversaries of the superior culture of their southern neighbours. Perhaps it was for similar reasons that in Guantanamo Bay prisoners from Asia and the Middle East were subjected to a barrage of western pop music. Such adversarial communication is the antithesis of the subject of a book I rediscovered yesterday. In a dusty corner of my study, I came across The Miracle of Dialogue written by an American academic called Reuel Howe and published in the UK over 40 years ago. I think it was the book's dedication which originally attracted my attention. To my students who in dialogue become my teachers. Howe speaks of how dialogue saves us from enmity, and claims that the miracle of dialogue 'can bring a relationship into being; and it can bring into being once again a relationship that has died.' This - dialogue - is what, I believe, we were made for. And an ancient story at the beginning of the Bible indicates as much. It is when Adam has done that which he was forbidden to do and then tries to hide. God breaks the silence with the question, 'Where are you?' Thereby Adam – a name which means 'earthling' - discovers he was meant for dialogue. We can trace through recent history – whether in the conflicts of Northern Ireland, or the standoffish behaviour exhibited to nations like Iran – that when opposing sides do nothing but defame each other and hide behind partisan slogans, such an exercise in self-induced deafness only exacerbates conflict. And you and I will have experienced that when we have removed ourselves from conversation with people who have offended us or whom we have offended, we can become cocooned behind a wall of silence rehearsing again and again our grievances and self righteousness or excoriating the other. We were not made for this. We were made for dialogue. We were made to risk the possibility that not just by listening to, but by engaging with those from whom we have distanced ourselves, we might discover the resurrection of a relationship that has died. This indeed is what happened the other day across the Korean border when the polemic stopped, dialogue began and conflict was defused.