"Attitude is more important than terminology, but since you have to use terms you should try to use the most acceptable one to the people most directly affected."

Marion, you have just summed up in a sentence the simple and straightforward truth about a debate that grinds on endlessly in all kinds of places, and gets people hot under the collar.

You wouldn't like to do the same thing with the Mudcat's perennial "What is Folk?" discussion would you? No, better not. It's one of the rituals that keeps this place going.

The Cape Breton l'Arche website is great, and it's in my favourites now, and I'll stick a link to it on my own website. Only thing missing is a set of links to other l'Arche sites. And maybe a sound file of you and Eric and Maggie and company...

The kind of nonsense you mentioned about "music therapy" is familiar enough. You get the same sort of thing around all kinds of "therapies", totally inappropriate professionalisation. Ivan Illich wrote some very insightful stuff about this kind of thing. So has Jean Vanier in another way.

(Jean Vanier related story: we once had a friend who was a nurse, with a great gift for getting enthusiastic about new ways of seeing the world - and one day we met her and she said she'd come across this great woman writer called Jean Vanier. We tactfully told her it was the French type of Jean, and that he was a man...)