January/February 2007 Newsletter

The Religious Language Newsletter
Volume 8, Issue 1 -- January/February 2007
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The Religious Language Newsletter (available by e-mail only) is written and published every other month by Suzette Haden Elgin, Ph.D. (linguistics), from the Ozark Center for Language Studies (OCLS), at PO Box 1137, Huntsville, AR 72740-1137. For additional information, or to unsubscribe, please e-mail ocls@madisoncounty.net.
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In This Issue: Editor's Note; Network Input; BookNotes; Quotes & Comments; Cyberspace; A Religion and Language Controversy; Correction

#Editor's Note

Greetings, and my thanks to all of you for your renewals and for all the materials you've been sending me. This is a crowded issue, so I'll move right on....

#Network Input

1. From Claudia Camp, in response to my anecdote in the 11-12/06 issue about the little boy telling his sister that "God" is a boy's name...

"I'm a little uncertain what the author's point was in conveying this anecdote and then also a little uncertain exactly what your question is about it. So maybe this is too simplistic a response, especially to a linguist, but the story seemed to me a good example of how our natural learning of language, to the extent it involves grammatical gender, also conditions our ideas about gender as part of human difference. That is, this boy has spent his entire 10 years of life hearing 'Albert...he; Bob...he; Carl...he; David...he; Earl...he; Frank...he; God...he; Henry...he;' etc. Why wouldn't he take it for granted that 'God just isn't a girl's name'? ... The 5 year old girl hasn't had as long to sort this out, but that's what older brothers are for. I guess I'm assuming that most people do think of God, capital G, as a name, in spite of knowing about 'gods.' But my experience with my students
suggests that this is the case. Or, to put it more precisely, it's not that they actually *think* of God as a name; rather they haven't *thought* about it at all -- it's just a matter of how they've always used it. Learning about Yahweh is typically quite a surprise."

**I should have made myself more clear; I apologize. What I found befuddling was the final line of the anecdote: "And, the mother said to Snow, 'This simple out-of-the-mouths-of-babes remark put an end to any theological dilemma for them.' " Full stop. That is, the mother -- who is said to be an Episcopalian! -- appears to agree with her son that "God just isn't a girls name" proves that God is male, and feels no need to discuss the matter any further with her children.

2. And Margaret Carter wrote:

"The comment, 'Unfortunately some people actually believe God is male,' reminded me of C. S. Lewis, who did believe God is masculine (not male). He believed masculine and feminine to be objectively real categories, of which biological male and female are only concrete instances. In the essay "Priestesses in the Church," he acknowledged that women were as capable as men of performing the tasks involved in a clerical vocation and could represent the congregation to God as well as men could. He maintained that women shouldn't be priests because a female couldn't represent God to the congregation, it being an objective reality that God is masculine. Lewis supported this position by appealing to the Bible, stating that God chose to present Himself to us in masculine terms and we can't arbitrarily ignore that fact. On first reading, I found this argument hard to answer. Later, I realized that, considering God in the Judeo-Christian tradition revealed God's-self to a patriarchal culture, there are a striking number of feminine images for God in the Bible, which Lewis apparently overlooked.

Madeleine L'Engle handles the He/She problem by using "El," one of the Hebrew words for God, as a pronoun when referring to God."

3. Next, an excerpt from a long and interesting letter by Anne Newkirk Niven, who wrote:

"I found your comments on the so-called 'feminization' of the Church fascinating; coming from a Christian background myself... However, I suspect that a broader sociological pattern may be at work here, because, at the very same time the Church is being accused of being too feminine for 'real men' we are starting to see the very same accusations of 'feminization' leveled at -- you guessed it -- Paganism.

I'm the editor of several Pagan magazines, and recently have become aware of a rising tide of Pagan men complaining about how women dominate Wicca, Witchcraft, and American Paganism in general. Approximately 70% of our readers *are* female, and female leadership, if not the norm, is certainly unremarkable in American Paganism. But the idea that men were feeling put upon, even downright oppressed, because of their gender, was news to me until it started erupting in the pages of my magazines."

**It seems to me that there's an interesting and significant difference between the objections being made by Christian men and those coming from Pagan men. The Christian males seem to be complaining that everything to do with church services and activities is so sissy and so cuddly and so pink-lacey that they can't stand to have anything to do with it. The Pagan males on the other hand, in the examples I've read, are complaining that -- as you say above -- they face outright oppression and prejudice. Both groups may be using the word "feminization," but I don't think they're using it with the same meaning.

#BookNotes

1. _Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs To Know_, by Stephen Prothero (HarperSanfrancisco 2007); ISBN 0-06-084670-4.

My thanks to Diana Cook for sending me this very useful book. Prothero's thesis is that although Americans are very religious they know very little about religion, and that this causes all sorts of social muddles -- for example, it has the extreme Religious Right convinced that the extreme Religious Left has taken over the country, and vice versa. He discusses this problem (which he calls "religious illiteracy") and its history, and offers suggestions for fixing it, all very reasonably and articulately.

For me, however, the book is most valuable for pp. 131-215, which is Prothero's proposed "Dictionary of Religious Literacy." This section is a set of brief definitions of terms, with supporting information, starting with "Abraham" and ending with "Zionism"; in between are "family values" and "fatwa" and "Hinduism" and "Presbyterianism" and so on.

As is always true with such collections, people will quibble over what other terms should have been included, and will object to the inclusion of some items that are already there. People will find data that they feel isn't exactly right, or is inadequate. Nevertheless, anyone who is familiar with all the terms Prothero has chosen, and the information he has provided about them, will be able to hold his or her own in religious conversations. Here is a sample from page 211, to show you the style and flavor:

"Torah. This term ('teaching' in Hebrew) refers most broadly to Jewish Law, both oral and written. More narrowly, it refers to the Hebrew Bible, which Jews call the Tanakh. More narrowly still, it refers to the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, and to the synagogue scrolls on which these holy books are written. The most famous effort to distill the Torah down to one simple formulation comes from the famed rabbi Hillel, a contemporary of Jesus. When asked to summarize the Torah while standing on one leg, Hillel answered: 'What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and study it."

And here is a quote from the entry for the Quran (which is too lengthy to include in full here), on page 197:

"In addition to the unity of God and the prophethood of Muhammad, the Quran teaches the bodily resurrection and a coming judgment. It requires prayers and almsgiving and fasting and pilgrimage. It portrays a world in which one God repeatedly reveals his will to human beings through prophets and messengers that stretch from Moses to Jesus to Muhammad."

Recommended.

2. _American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century_, by Kevin Phillips (Viking 2006); ISBN 978-0-7394-7188-3.

This really _will_ be just a note, with no pretense of being even a brief review. I know that it's possible to review this book, because I've read a dozen examples, but it's beyond my skill. Phillips is Cassandra, prophesying doom, and he blames it on the three factors listed in his cumbersome subtitle: the U.S. dependence on oil; radical religion in the U.S.; and the United States' new status as the world's Number One Debtor. He takes these up one at a time, wildly different though they are, and manages somehow to work all of them into a single book.

I was captivated by the opening section of the book -- the section on oil. What I learned from reading just that section was worth the price of the book, and worth the time I spend reading. The middle section, which is a painstaking and detailed account of the rise of the extreme religious Right wing in this country, was a laborious read -- but valuable; I especially enjoyed the arguments for the idea that being Southern has become in itself a civic religion, with its roots in the Civil War. I'm very glad I had the opportunity to read that. The final section -- the one that takes up our incomprehensible and terrifying indebtedness to foreign governments and the inevitable economic catastrophe built into that indebtedness -- was even harder to read. I did read it, all the way through, because I knew I should, and I emerged better informed, but I did _not_ enjoy it.

It did not seem to me that Kevin Phillips made any particularly vigorous effort to interweave these three sections; perhaps it's not possible. They are all linked under the rubric "Three things that doom the United States and should be stopped immediately," and he takes them up one at a time. I recommend this book, in spite of my complaints. I read widely on all three of its topics, but it contained a great deal of information that was new to me. However, I recommend it only for the reader who is willing to _work_.

#Quotes & Comments

1. "What then _are_ religious revelations ultimately about? They are centrally made up of important religious narratives that shape the lives of the faithful in that tradition; they are formative, not informative. They don't reveal (or "report") secret bits of information to us... Religious narratives are told and retold, chanted and danced in liturgies, meditated upon and depicted in art, taken to heart, interiorized and ultimately translated into existence, into a way of living, which is where they have their payoff."

This is John D. Caputa -- who argues that whatever understanding we may have of God is based on faith rather than on knowledge -- in "On Being Clear About Faith," pp. 40-42, _Books & Culture_ for 11-12/06, on page 42. He is responding to an article on pp. 39-40 by Stephen Williams, titled "On Religion and Revelation." Williams writes, on page 40:

"Why, if there has been a revelation of God along the lines described in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, is it not universally clear? ... Pascal gave an answer. ... The reason is that he wants to be found by those who seek."

[Note, while I'm here: I find that word "payoff" in the Caputa quote incredibly discordant.]

2. "... [F]rom the fourth century onwards.... the complex Latin hymns and Psalms used in religious services were chanted or sung by the clergy or choir with little or no lay participation. Such an arrangement was grounded in the notion that liturgical order demanded a clear separation of clerical and lay voices and that the laity was to remain silent while the clergy... sang on its behalf. As part of their reformation of the mass, Reformers dismantled the distinction between clerical and lay liturgical duties, and argued that all the people -- priests, men, women, and children -- were to sing vernacular Psalms and hymns together. As Robin Leaver notes, congregational singing displayed the Protestant emphasis on the 'priesthood of all believers' in a highly practical and visible way, and it is thus not surprising that many Catholics responded to the new practice with hostility."

This is Micheline White, in "Protestant Women's Writing and Congregational Psalm Singing," pp. 61 to 79, in the 2005 _Sidney Journal_; on page 63. White goes on on page 64 to quote John Witvliet saying that letting the women sing was a striking "innovation in an era in which women's voices could otherwise be heard in worship only in a convent."

This issue of the _Sidney Journal_ (Volume 23: 1-2) is filled with interesting information related to the Psalms, some of it very surprising, almost all of it new to me. The publication has a website at http://www.english.cam.ac.us/sidney/journal.htm .

3. On page 12 of _Findings: Poets and the Crisis of Faith_, by John Lampen (Pendle Hill Pamphlet 310), in a discussion of what acute religious/spiritual crisis is like:

"There is only one religious experience which still appears possible, and that is to ask questions. This may sound strange to those who maintain that a firm faith is the hallmark of a Christian, that 'though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.' But to doubt, to question and challenge God, is to believe against whatever odds in the possibility of an answer."

This small book, written in the framework of the Quaker faith, quotes and discusses selections on its topic from many different poets. For example, on page 35, from poet and folksinger Sydney Carter:

"Your holy hearsay is not evidence;
Give me the Good News in the present tense.
What happened nineteen hundred years ago
May not have happened -- how am I to know?"

[Source: "The Present Tense," in Carter's _The Two-Way Clock_, 1974.]

4. I recommend Gary Wolf's article about New Atheism -- "The Church of the Non-Believers" -- on pp. 182-193 of the 11/06 issue of _Wired_. Here's a sample from page 191:

"On the one hand, it is obvious that the political prospects of the New Atheism are slight. People see a contradiction in its tone of certainty. Contemptuous of the faith of others, its proponents never doubt their own belief. They are fundamentalists. I hear this protest dozens of times. It comes up in every conversation. Even those who might side with the New Atheists are repelled by their strident tone."

And on page 193:

"The New Atheists have castigated fundamentalism and branded even the mildest religious liberals as enablers of a vengeful mob. Everybody who does not join them is an ally of the Taliban. But, so far, their provocation has failed to take hold. Given all the religious trauma in the world, I take this as good news. "

What he said. This is a very good and thorough article, and not a polemic. You can read it online at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/atheism.html . [It's interesting that in the 12/06 issue the editors of _Wired_ report that the New Atheism article drew more responses from readers than "any other story in memory." All of those responses are posted at http://blog.wired.com/letters .]

5. "Religious speech is extreme, emotional, and motivational. It is anti-literal, relying on metaphor, allusion, and other rhetorical devices, and it assumes knowledge within a community of believers. Its potency is deliberate: faith is about calling on a higher power, one stronger than ourselves, and the very language we use helps inflate that strength. We arm ourselves (itself a violent metaphor) with prayer. This is hardly unique to Islam. ... Over the centuries, and even today, the Bible and Christian theology have helped justify the Crusades, slavery, violence against gays, and the murder of doctors who perform abortions. The words themselves are latent, inert, harmless -- until they aren't."

This comes from an article on pp. 82-93 of the 10/06 issue of the _Atlantic_, an article that I recommend that you read in its entirety; the quote is from page 88. It's written by Amy Waldman, and titled "Poetic Justice." The article is a detailed account of a court case brought by the U.S. government against a young American Muslim. One of the pieces of evidence the prosecution offered as proof that he was a terrorist was that he carried in his wallet a scrap of paper on which was written, in Arabic, "Oh Allah, we place you at their throats, and we seek refuge in you from their evil." The prosecution's experts claimed that this sequence of religious language was uncommon and "almost secretive," but when Waldman consulted scholars "they recognized it, and called it very common." Ingrid Mattson (professor of Islamic studies, wrote: "It is a traditional supplication that you will find in many, many collections of prayers." (All on page 90)

You can read the article online at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200610/waldman-islam .

6. From "One Nation... Under God?", by Barack Obama, pp. 8-16, _Sojourners_ for 11/06, on page 15:

"Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reaons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is acessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

This is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves compromise, the art of what's possible."

My thanks to Patricia Mathews for the copy.

7. The cover story for the 11/13/06 issue of _Time_ (pp. 48-55) was a debate titled "God vs. Science," between Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins; the journalist author was David Van Biema. Samples:

On page 51:
Dawkins: "The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no."
Collins: "Yes. God's existence is either true or not. But calling it a scientific question implies that the tools of science can provide the answer. From my perspective, God cannot be completely contained within nature, and therefore God's existence is outside of science's ability to really weigh in."

On page 54:
Time: "Doesn't the very notion of miracles throw off science?"
Collins: "Not at all. If you are in the camp I am, one place where science and faith could touch each other is in the investigation of supposedly miraculous events."
Dawkins: "If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle."

You can read the debate online at http://www.time.com/time/ magazine/article/0,9171,1555132-1,00.html .

8. "[Leon] Kass's seven-hundred-page tome, _The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis_, performs what he calls an 'unmediated reading' of the first book of the Bible. ... The 'new way' according to Kass, is really the old way, and can be summarized in a single word: _patriarchy_. Man rules in this world, and woman obeys -- to her benefit. From the president's point man on ethics, we read that 'a prolonged period of barrenness' before childbirth is God's way of 'taming the dangerous female pride in her generative power,' and that marriage as an 'institution of stable domestic arrangements for rearing the young depends on some form of man's rule over woman.' "

This is from "Please Stand By While the Age of Miracles Is Briefly Suspended," by James McManus, on pp. 90-95 of the 8/04 _Esquire_, and Leon Kass was, until 2005, the chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics here in the States.

9. Thanks to Douglas Dee for a copy of "Americans find an unwavering ally in God," by Jeff Diamant (_Sunday Star-Ledger_ for 9/17/06). Samples:

"One out of five Americans believe in a God who favors the United States in worldly affairs. ... Nineteen percent of the 1,721 people surveyed [byBaylor University] said they either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that 'God favors the United States in worldly affairs.' Of those surveyed, Republicans were four times as likely as Democrats to see God as a champion of the United States."

"Thirty-one percent believed in an 'authoritarian' God who is active in daily life and largely concerned with punishing humans; 23 percent believed in a 'benevolent' God who is less interested in punishment; 16 percent believed in a 'critical' God who doesn't interfere with daily life but keeps score for an afterlife; and 25 percent believed in a 'distant' God who had set the laws of nature in motion but was no longer involved in events of this world."

I was surprised by this story. I was surprised that almost a third of those surveyed believed in a God who was "largely concerned with punishing humans." But I was much more surprised to learn that twenty percent of those surveyed believed that the people of the United States are God's chosen people. I would have expected that percentage to be much lower.

10. Patricia Mathews sent me a copy of Lakshmi Chaudhry's "The Godless Fundamentalist" (pp. 33-35 of the 12/06 issue of _In These Times_). It seems that Richard Dawkins, not satisfied with print, has now come up with a documentary presenting his views, titled "The Root of All Evil," in which he -- if this review is accurate -- travels all over the world insulting people he perceives as religious. Chaudhry writes, on page 33: "...Dawkins' fondness for sweeping generalizations reflects his own deep-seated fundamentalism, a virulent form of atheism that mirrors the polarized worldview of the religious extremists it claims to oppose." Also on page 33, Chaudhry tells readers that Dawkins, together with Daniel Dennett, Greg Graffin, and Sam Harris, make up "the self-styled 'Brights,' the moniker of choice for Dawkins to describe 'a person whose worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements.' "

I agree with Chaudhry's assessment of the "Brights"; I see no difference between their proselytising for atheism and any other proselytising. And I could not improve on this paragraph from page 34:

"In this version of atheist theology, Science attains the same status as Dawkins' loathed 'alpha male in sky'... If we do not quite understand how the universe was created or the human brain works -- or the competing, contradictory claims about the virtues of, say, table salt -- all we need to do is wait and keep faith in the scientific method, which will reveal all in good time. The ways of Science are no less sacred or mysterious than that of God."

It must be extraordinarily frustrating to the "Brights" that the only language they have available for expressing their own fundamentalism is identical to the religious language used by fundamentalists of any other stripe, except for using different names. It's no wonder their works are so bad-tempered.

11. Thanks to Wib Smith for an interview by Bethany Saltman titled "The Temple of Reason: Sam Harris On How Religion Puts The World At Risk," on pp. 5-8 of the 9/06 issue of _The Sun_. Saltman tells us in her introduction that Sam Harris's perception was that "9/11 should have exposed the dangerous irrationality of religious belief, but instead it pushed the United States even deeper into its own religiosity." (on page 5)

On page 6, Harris says: "If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion. ... I would not say that all human conflict is born of religion or religious differences, but for the human community to be fractured on the basis of religious doctrines that are fundamentally incompatible, in an age when nuclear weapons are proliferating, is a terrifying scenario. I think we do the world a disservice when we suggest that religions are generally benign and not fundamentally divisive."

And then, on page 8, there is this very interesting exchange:

"Saltman: Would you identify yourself as an atheist?"
"Harris: Well, I'm not eager to do that. For one thing, atheists have a massive public-relations problem in the United States. Second, atheists as a group are generally not interested in the contemplative life and disavow anything profound that might be realized by meditation of some other deliberate act of introspection. _[Note: Harris himself is a practitioner of Buddhist meditation.]_ Third, I just think it's an unnecessary term. We don't have names for someone who doesn't believe in astrology or alchemy. I don't think not believing in God should brand someone with a new identity."

If this is an accurate reflection of Harris's position, he must find it irritating that the media have arbitrarily made him a member of the "New Atheists" and that they associate his work -- for example, his book _The End of Faith_ -- with the work of Richard Dawkins. However, according to Saltman, that book's "central tenet is that religion -- and religious tolerance -- perpetuates and protects unjustifiable (not to mention just plain silly) beliefs." (On page 5)

It's one thing for atheists to say openly that they disagree with the beliefs of any and all religious faiths. That's consistent with their ideology and is what you would expect them to say. What's _new_ about the "New Atheists" is their very public insistence that the standard practice of religious tolerance -- that is, saying "I'm certain that you're wrong, but you have a right to your beliefs and I respect that right" -- must be stamped out. There've been occasional instances of that stance in the past, but my recollection is that they've always remained on the fringe; they've never, until now, spawned best-selling books and media presentations.

#Cyberspace

1. One of my blog readers, in a comment, posted this as a Quaker "dictum"; I'd like to make it a universal requirement.

"Before you speak, ask yourself; is it kind; is it true; is it necessary?"

Suppose you decided that what you were about to say was hostile, and a lie, and in no way necessary, but you were going to say it anyway; at least you would be fully aware of what you were doing.

2. The _Internet Scout Report_ for 12/1/06 recommends the _Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion_, at
http://www.lawandreligion.com , and describes it as follows:

"...[T]he Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion was the first online legal journal dedicated to the study of the dynamic interaction between law and religion. Started in 1999, the journal has published dozens of articles written by law students at Rutgers... Visitors can browse through their online archives to read these articles, and they may also wish to look over their 'New Developments' section. Here they will find brief summaries of current issues in law and religion."

[Note -- Access to the journal is free; the articles are PDFs.]

3. From "New Ministries -- and Books -- Evangelize a Generation," by Donna Freitas, in the 12/13/06 _Religion BookLine_:

"Fans of The Hip Hop Prayer Book (Church Publishing, June) will no longer be disappointed when they feel the spirit move them. Worshipers can now purchase a companion CD, And the Word Was Hip Hop: HopHopEMass (Church Publishing, November), a series of 13 original songs produced by Episcopal priest Timothy Holder and the same group of rappers who helped Holder do the prayer book. 'Communities already using the prayer book requested the book's raps on CD,' explained Church editor Lucas Smith."

According to Smith, the publishing house heard about hip hop masses going on in the South Bronx and went to one to see what was going on. And they found that instead of a choir a hip hop mass uses a 'hype man' -- a rapper or rappers -- with a backbeat, "speaking the language of the streets to open up the gospel."

For more information about the use of hip hop as religious language, see: "Shout-Out to the Lord," by Ansley Roan, at http://www. beliefnet.com/story/196/story_19636.html ; and "Hip-hop trend adding young congregants to churches," by Tania Padgett, at http://afgen.com/holy_hip_hop.html . Padgett's article has the hip hop version of the Twenty-Third Psalm; here's a sample:

"And even though I walk through the Hood of death,
I don't back down
For you have my back."

I have been trying to decide whether some of the adult male Protestants who complain about their church services being excessively feminine and overly cuddly might be more satisfied if this new genre were added to their Sunday mornings -- and I don't know. Hip hop is unquestionably identified with _youth_; on the other hand, it's probably easier to add "manly" language to a rap than to a traditional hymn.

4. My recommendations for "The Celestial Teapot," a _New Republic Online_ review by James Wood of Sam Harris' book _Letter to a Christian Nation_, at http://www.powells.com/review/2006_12_14 . Wood begins this very long and interesting review by saying that although he hasn't believed in God since he was a teenager, he was raised in a religious household; and then he goes on to write about the language used in that household:

"Ordinary language was saturated with religiosity. A happy occurrence was a 'blessing' or was 'providential'... An untidy bedroom was evidence of 'poor stewardship.' I was encouraged not to wish people 'good luck,' this being rather secular. The word I heard most often, of course, was 'faith,' since none of the other words could have functioned without it. I was fascinated when from time to time my parents would discuss, in hushed tones, an acquaintance who had 'lost his faith.' The phrase, so solemnly unsheathed, seemed to point to unimaginable wildernesses."

Every page of the review has at least one section I'd like to quote; since that's impossible, I'll choose two more quotes and urge you to read the rest. Here they are...

[Referring to the "New Atheists"] "...[A]ll these writers are correct to argue that religion is unfairly protected by a _cordon sanitaire_ of 'respect'. In America, all you need to do is intone the word 'faith' and your opponent will start backing away from you in terror, like a vampire before a crucifix. ... Having set fire to religion's firewall of respect, the genre moves on to point out that millions of people believe that their religious traditions are the right ones, and that they cannot all be right."

"We have to acknowledge that most religious language cannot be tested for its provability by a philosophical rationalism that anyway defines the terms of that provability. Religious language, as Wittgenstein never tired of pointing out, is a practice, not an experiment; its referents are defined by how it is used. There are grammatical differences between the use of religious language and ordinary language."

5. My thanks to Wib Smith for sending "The Good Book Business: Why publishers love the Bible," by Daniel Radosh, online at http://www.newyorker.com/ printables/fact/061218fa_fact1 . Where we learn that "Calculating how many Bibles are sold in the United States is a virtually impossible task, but a conservative estimate is that in 2005 Americans purchased some twenty-five million Bibles -- twice as many as the most recent Harry Potter book. The amount spent annually on Bibles has been put at more than half a billion dollars." And...

"Into this world came "Good News for Modern Man." Published by the American Bible Society in 1966, "Good News for Modern Man" was a Bible for the young and disaffected. ... [It] was revolutionary not just in its packaging but also in its text. Until then, major Bible translations in English had taken an approach now known as 'formal equivalence,' striving to maintain the sentence structure, phrasing, and idioms of the original Hebrew and Greek. The Good News Translation, as it's usually known, followed the precepts of 'functional equivalence' -- translating not word for word but thought for thought, with the goal of capturing the meaning of the original text, even if that required massaging the words or reordering sentences."

As an example of the functional equivalence approach, Radosh offers Amos 4:6, which literally translated reads "I gave you cleanness of teeth." Radosh writes that "The New International Version eliminates the potential misreading that God was punishing the wicked with dental hygiene, and translates the phrase as 'I gave you empty stomachs.' "

6. From the 11/22/06 issue of _Religion BookLine_, in a review of Nate Larkin's _Samson and the Pirate Monks: Calling Men to Authentic Brotherhood_ (W Publishing Group):

"Currently in vogue is 'the Christian Men's Movement,' a reaction to the perceived feminization of Christianity... Using the biblical Samson as a model, Larkin offers 'The Samson Society,' a coming together of evangelical men to encourage and help each other on the road to a full Christian life. Blessed with great strength and a pleasing physique, Samson nonetheless suffered from moral lapses and a lack of clarity about his mission. In the end this would be his undoing. .... Included is a plan for Christian men to begin their own Samson Society."

Larson, the review says, considers himself and his fellow churchmen to be the "pirate monks" of the subtitle. What this might have to do with Samson, I cannot imagine. Samson was a very early version of a suicide bomber; he pulled down a building on a group of other people, despite the fact that doing so meant his own death. A pirate, or a monk -- much less a "pirate monk" -- he was not.

7. "Just when things had settled down at the famed Heider farm after the 1994 birth of a white buffalo calf named 'Miracle,' this phenomenon has taken a startling new turn. Yet another white buffalo calf was born Aug. 24, this time during a severe thunderstorm at the Wisconsin farm. This is where Miracle was born almost exactly 12 years earlier, the first to be seen since 1933. Miracle died at the age of 10, and Valerie Heider named the new arrival 'Miracle's Second Chance.' Lakota spiritual leaders have acknowledge the calves as the real thing, a message from the White Buffalo Calf Woman."

This is from an editorial titled "White buffalo calf: 'Chance' to heed prophecy," online at http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id-1096413912&print=yes . I recommend it, and I'd like to quote just a bit more from the piece -- a bit more that I find both heartening and surprising -- here:

"Many lessons will be learned from the arrival of Miracle's Second Chance; indigenous spiritual leaders and thinkers are busy interpreting them. All of them... agree on the need for unity among all people of the world in order to restore harmony on sacred Mother Earth. But one would venture to comment on one particular paradox, since it concerns the relations of Indian country to the dominant society. As some have noted, most of the recent white buffalo calves (there have been a few since Miracle) have been delivered to non-Indian owners. The overwhelming message seems to be that their lessons are meant not just for Lakota or American Indians, but for all humankind. ... Perhaps the arrival of the sacred calf to non-Indians is a call to seek the common ground that exists between us, and to acknowledge that we are at a crossroads of great change that must be somehow navigated as one people."

8. Cyberplaces to visit: Wendy Somerson's review ("Double Identity"), of Laurel Snyder's _Half/Life: Jew-Ish Tales from Almost, Not Quite, and In-Between_, at http://www.powells.com/bit/review/2006_08_27 ; "Intelligent design: The God Lab," at http://tinyurl.com/yaxud2 .

#A Religion and Language Controversy

There is an ongoing controversy involving a link between language science (in many fields) and religion. It would be unacceptable for me not to bring it up in this newsletter; on the other hand, it's an issue so complicated that it's hard to know how to approach it. Let me say in advance that I know what I write here will be an oversimplification. In brief, then....

The language science community has to have a standard way to unambiguously identify the 6000-7000 languages of the world, and that need has been filled for some time -- under the auspices of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) -- by the set of three-letter Ethnologue codes assembled by SIL, the Summer Institute of Linguistics. (For example, the Cherokee language is identified by the code "chr".) The most current version of this set of codes is referred to as "ISO 639-3:2007." Linguists will immediately tell you that the Ethnologue set is riddled with errors, although they will not always agree on what the errors are; often the problem is a disagreement over whether some variety of speech is a language or a dialect. Many -- but not all -- linguists will also tell you that there is simply no feasible alternative to that set of codes, although the errors must of course be corrected. Some linguists will tell you that the problem is rapidly being solved, with SIL becoming only a "curator" for the set of codes.

The controversy arises from the fact that SIL is affiliated with the Wycliffe Bible Translators organization, whose goal is to provide a translation of the Bible into every human language and, if possible, use that translation to convert the native speakers of each language to Christianity. Which leads to questions like this one, in a letter from Hein van der Voort (on page 5 of the 10/06 issue of the _SSILA Newsletter_):

"The central issue I raise here is an ethical one: should we as scientists collaborate so directly with a proselytizing organization, lending it legitimacy and potentially contributing to its ultimate goal -- that of replacing indigenous cultures with a specific Western one?"

For some language scientists the whole thing is a tempest in a teapot; for others, it's a matter of passionate conviction with no possibility of compromise; and there are representatives of every position in between the two extremes. I have no idea how it is going to work out in the end.

If you'd like to read more about this, a Google search will take you to an overabundance of materials; for basic information about the codes themselves, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639_codes , and to "Three-letter codes for identifying languages," at http://www.ethnologue.com/codes .

#Correction

From Douglas Dee: The link to "Controversial new Bible cuts out difficult gospel passages" in the 11-12/06 issue should be http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/content/ news_syndication/article_061018bible.shtml , with a double "k" in "ekklesia," not the single K I gave it.

Contact: ocls@madisoncounty.net

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