July/August 2001 Newsletter

THE RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE NEWSLETTER
Volume 2, Issue 4 -- July/August 2001
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The Religious Language Newsletter is written and published every other month by Suzette Haden Elgin, Ph.D. (linguistics), from the Ozark Center for Language Studies (OCLS), PO Box 1137, Huntsville, AR 72740-1137 USA; e-mail OCLS@madisoncounty.net. It's available by e-mail only, in plain text, and is free to members of the Lovingkindness Network. To join the network, send $5.00 (annual dues) to OCLS; please be sure to include your e-mail address with your check, money order, or credit card information. For more information, contact OCLS. Thanks to a generous donation, all issues are posted at http://www.forlovingkindness.org. [Donations to LK are tax-deductible; Supporting Memberships are $15.00.]
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IN THIS ISSUE: Editor's Note; Network Input; Booknotes; Cyberstuff; More on Neurotheology; Quotes & Comments; Another Lovingkindness Prayer; Business...

EDITOR'S NOTE

Those of you who you don't get _The Linguistics & Science Fiction Newsletter_ may not be aware of my free (in all senses of the word) online linguistics course -- Real World Linguistics 101 -- at http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin. There are now six lessons posted in the course; your comments would be very welcome. And many thanks to all of you who've been sending me materials.

NETWORK INPUT

1. Clarke Stone responded to my puzzlement about the word "convicting" in a sequence of religious language: "Conviction" in fundamentalism is the feeling that you are missing something in your life that you can't get in this world. ... The agent of conviction is the Holy Spirit, and this is why blaspheming the Holy Spirit is the unforgiveable sin: once you have completely rejected the agent of conviction, you will never be able to know you have done wrong. ... It's your conscience; but since humans are inherently sinful, they have to be motivated to guilt for their actions from an outside source (i.e., the Holy Spirit). The process of feeling that guilt and becoming more sensitive to the sinful parts of your acts is conviction. This word is also used when people feel a new mission coming on. "Brothers and sisters, I have felt so convicted about these homeless children..."

2. In the May/June issue I mentioned an article on "religious neurobiology" (at http://www.newscientist.com/newsletter/features.jsp?id=ns22871) describing the work of neuroscientist Michael Persinger, who claims that with a technique called "transcranial magnetic stimulation" he can produce experiences which cannot be distinguished from genuine religious experiences. Dale Neiburg wrote as follows: "Highly illogical, Captain. The fact that A is capable of causing B doesn't mean that B is always the result of A. If I were to hit the skeptics in question over the head, they'd see stars. If they subsequently go outdoors at night and see stars, it doesn't follow that someone has just hit them over the head."

3. Thanks to Anna Vargo for a collection of Meyers-Briggs-personality-types prayers. I don't think you have to be familiar with the Meyers-Briggs categories to appreciate the humor in this case; the prayers are funny in themselves and they are fascinating linguistically. Consider, for example, these two: "Lord, help me to relax about insignificant details beginning tomorrow at 11:41:23 a.m. e.s.t.", and "God, help me to not try to RUN everything. But, if You need some help, just ask." My favorite in the set is "God, give me patience, and I mean right NOW." You can find the whole list at Daniel Khaykis' website -- http://vision.cs.qc.edu/daniel/meyers.html. (I wasn't able to determine whether he wrote the set of prayers himself or was just passing them along; no byline appears anywhere. In either case, I'm grateful.)

4. Claudia Camp very kindly spent some time pondering the question of that last line in the Prayer of Jabez, the one that has been transformed from "don't let me suffer pain" to "don't let me cause pain" in the New King James Version of the Bible. Her conclusion is that it's just barely possible that "don't let me cause pain" is an accurate translation, if you do heroic grammardances; her preference is for the "don't let me suffer pain" version. And while she was at it, she also tried her hand at the question of why that Irish Blessing ("may the road rise up to meet you") is so compelling and beloved, writing that....

"It's effective for me for several reasons. One is its tactile quality in combination with its ability to draw up in my mind a picture in which I effortlessly place myself... Second, it brings to bear in a very compact yet nuanced way, using qualified binaries, a sense of complete experience. The road rising up faces my front, contrasted with the wind at my back; the sun contrasts with the rain, yet one is warm and the other soft, so both remain pleasurable; the road suggests a journey while the field suggests home, and both are good. This point is related in a way to the completeness found in Elizabeth Barrette's five magical elements... Finally, I would guess that ending up in God's palm, or some such thought, was original. It provides such a satisfying twist on the experience the prayer creates of feeling/seeing yourself in it. One minute you're down there on the road/in the field and that's all there is; next minute you suddenly get this bigger perspective, feeling/seeing yourself on the road/in the field/in God's palm. Nice."

5. From Margaret Carter (excerpted from a long and useful and informative letter) "Your problem with the lack of strong, attractive good characters is a legitimate concern that I share with you. It's very difficult to write that kind of character convincingly. I just finished reading an essay by Dorothy Sayers that explores the classic treatments of the Devil in great literature, in which she points out how difficult it is to write about Satan without having him "steal the show." Fascinating villains are just easier to create than fascinating heroes. C. S. Lewis touches on this problem in an introduction to THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS. He says that to create a very evil character, the author must simply remember his/her own worst moments and imagine what it would be like to feel and behave that way all the time. To create a saintly or angelic hero, the average person would have to try to imagine a state of mind that he/she has probably never experienced in real life. Therefore, the average author's attempt to represent the inner life of a person of heroic goodness is likely to prove unconvincing."

That information about the tack taken by C.S. Lewis pleases me very much, and is something I would never have thought of. It doesn't solve the problem, but at least it provides us with a new angle for it, and that's tremendously valuable. Suppose ordinary people remember their very worst moments and try to extrapolate from them to write about someone truly permeated by evil. I can imagine that they might remember a horrible moment of being tempted to hit their spouse or child, even _kill_ their spouse or child, perhaps with poison or a gun. I cannot imagine them remembering a temptation to torture their spouse or child slowly over a period of weeks, or a temptation to dismember or disembowel or flay alive their spouse or child. And yet, torture and dismemberment and disembowelment and flaying alive seem to be staples of explicit horror writing today. And then there's the other side of the coin. If people _are_ able to go vastly beyond their personal experience at being an evil and demonic person, why shouldn't they be capable of going equally far beyond their personal experience at being a truly good and saintly/angelic person? Why should the one be so much harder than the other -- so much harder that for every ten thousand examples of well-portrayed evil characters we have trouble coming up with even _one_ well-portrayed character exemplifying goodness? It's like Bishop Kallistos Ware's question: Why, when it's so easy for us to say something so cruel that it can never be forgotten, it is so hard for us to say something good that is equally unforgettable?

I continue to feel that the problem may be lack of practice. From the very earliest years, our culture provides us with a multitude of opportunities for vicarious practice at being evil, through our media. But there's no corresponding opportunity to practice being truly good; the media don't provide those opportunities. (Just "being good," without the "truly" won't do; we say to kids all the time, "Be good," and we don't mean saintly or angelic, we just mean something along the lines of "Do what you're told and don't be rude." We need a new word, and it doesn't seem to me that either "saintly" or "angelic" serves the purpose very well.)

BOOKNOTES

1. _The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and "Women's Work"_, by Kathleen Norris, Paulist Press 1998; ISBN 0-8091-3801-8. This small book -- 89 pages, undersized -- was sent to me by Anna Vargo; I didn't know it existed, and I'm very glad to have it. Norris opens with a tale of her first attendance at a Catholic mass as an adult and her astonishment when she saw the priest washing up after communion was over. "I found it enormously comforting," she says on page 3, "to see the priest as a kind of daft housewife, overdressed for the kitchen, puttering about the altar, washing up..." She goes on to discuss at length the problem of the many tiresome tasks that _somebody_ has to do daily for themselves and/or for others -- the tasks called "menial" -- how that problem affects the lives of women, and the challenge of making such tasks part of spiritual life. Highly recommended. Throughout, Norris quotes poetry and prose, and I want to give you two samples. First, on page 12, she writes of the rumor that as Dylan Thomas lay on his deathbed he said to the nun who was caring for him, "God bless you, Sister, may all your sons be archbishops." That one is breathtaking because it's so funny. And then this, from a poem by Margaret Gibson titled "Making Salad":

"I rub the dark hollow of the bowl
with garlic, near to the fire enough
so that fire reflects on the wood,
a reverie that holds emptiness
in high regard."

Also breathtaking. Not only because it is so beautiful, but because of the skill with which it's done. I'm not as helpless to explain what's happening as I often am; I can point this time to the double meaning of "reflects" reinforced by "reverie" and "regard," the flawless sound-patterning, and the use of Overlap Deletion in the last two lines. Awesome craft.

2. _Stigmata: A Medieval Mystery in a Modern Age_, by Ted Harrison, Penguin Books 1994; ISBN 0-14-025205-3. I found this one on the deep-discount remainder table at Barnes & Noble. [That doesn't always mean what it sounds like; _The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense_ has been on that table since I sold it to B&N in 1980, has sold well over a million copies from that location, and is still selling briskly. There are worse places for a book to be.] This is a very interesting read, with clear descriptions of stigmatics throughout history and up to the present day. It carefully discusses the controversy over what the stigmata mean, medically and spiritually, in those cases for which it seems impossible that they have been faked; it discusses the physiological mechanisms that might account for the wounds in a non-miraculous fashion; it never degenerates into popbabble or smarminess. I was interested to read that in recent times -- since the discovery that Roman crucifixions must have been done by driving nails through the wrists, not through the palms -- the wounds of stigmatics have begun appearing on their wrists.

3. _What Did Jesus Mean?: Explaining the Sermon on the Mount and the Parables in Simple and Universal Human Concepts_, by Anna Wierzbicka, NY: Oxford University Press 2001; ISBN 0-19-513733-7. 509 pages of very small type, nicely bound and essentially typo-free.

I really wanted other people's input about this book, which I'm very "conflicted" about. Did a Net search; almost nothing there except bookstore listings (although it did, serendipitously, take me to a whopping 55K "editorial" about praising and cursing by a Muslim cleric at zawaj.com, which I'm going to go back to for a future issue). I thought surely I could read some reviews at amazon.com, but found nothing there either. Very frustrating. If any of you have read the book and care to comment, I'd be pleased to hear from you.

I think this is a valuable and useful book, exhibiting the most scrupulously careful scholarship (insofar as I'm competent to judge); I'm glad to have it in the Lovingkindness library. I'm not sorry I bought it, and I recommend it. But if I am to be honest, I have to tell you that it would have been a far better book if it had been 250 pages instead of 509. Linguistics and religious language are two subjects I'm passionately interested in and well trained for; making religious language clear is a project that's dear to me; I have the utmost respect for Wierzbicka's work; I therefore ought to be crazy about this book. If _I_ find it difficult to read, I suspect it would be far worse for readers who don't fit that profile.

I'll give you a brief sample from the book so that you can see where it's headed, and stop with that. For the Beatitudes from Matthew (beginning with "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven"), Wierzbicka proposes on page 56 the "central message" below. She has constructed it using only items from the inventory that she proposes as universal (that is, as items present in all human languages), and she meticulously defends every last letter of every word, complete with lengthy supporting footnotes.

"everyone knows
very bad things happen to some people
these people feel something very bad because of this
I say:
God knows about this
God feels something bad because of this
God wants to do good things for these people because of this
God will do good things for these people because of this
these people feel something very bad for some time, not forever
God will want to do good things for these people forever"

CYBERSTUFF

I want to recommend a 1/28/01 _Slate_ article by Michael Kinsley, "God Bless You and... you know the rest," sent by Laura Mallard. Kinsley asks when the constitutional provision was passed "requiring every president and would-be president to end every speech with the words, 'God bless you, and God bless America.' " It has become such a linguistic ritual, he says, that it's starting to be suspicious for a politician _not_ to end a public statement with it. He imagines politicians at their dinner tables saying things like, "Pass the salt, honey. God bless you, and God bless America." He proposes that today's ritual political dialogue goes like this: X: "Have a nice day, Senator." Y: "God bless you, and God bless America." And he concludes by proposing that if this phenomenon is here to stay we make "God Bless America" the national anthem, on the grounds that the current national anthem is unsingable and even nonbelievers would prefer God's blessing to bombs bursting in air. You can read the whole thing -- plus amazing reader comments in response -- at http://slate.msn.com/Readme/01-01-25/Readme.asp.

MORE ON NEUROTHEOLOGY

1. Several network members sent me copies of "Religion and the Brain," by Sharon Begley and Anne Underwood, (on pp. 50-57 of the 5/7/01 issue of _Newsweek_). The piece provides accounts of various spiritual and/or mystical experiences, describes recent research, briefly discusses books published -- and conferences and organizations devoted to -- the subject, and lays out the issues in clear and nontechnical language. Here are two quotes:

"What all the research shares is a passion for uncovering the neurological underpinnings of spiritual and mystical experiences -- for discovering, in short, what happens in our brains.... In neurotheology, psychologists and neurologists try to pinpoint which regions turn on, and which turn off, during experiences that seem to exist outside time and space. ... ...[T]oday's studies try to identify the brain circuits that surge with activity when we think we have encountered the divine, and when we feel transported by intense prayer, an uplifting ritual or sacred music. Although the field is brand new and the answers only tentative, one thing is clear: Spiritual experiences are so consistent across cultures, across time and across faiths, says [David] Wulff, that it 'suggest[s] a common core that is likely a reflection of structures and processes in the human brain.' " (page 53)

"For all the tentative successes that scientists are scoring in their search for the biological bases of religious, spiritual and mystical experience, one mystery will surely be forever beyond their grasp. They may trace a sense of transcendence to _this_ bulge in our gray matter. And they may trace a feeling of the divine to _that_ one. But it is likely that they will never resolve the greatest question of all -- namely, whether our brain wiring creates God, or whether God created our brain wiring. Which you believe is, in the end, a matter of faith." (page 57)

2. _Religion Bookline_ for 6/12/01 had a review discussion of recent neurotheology books headed "Spotlight on...religion and neuroscience" and "Examining Our Heads for Faith." Including: "Matthew Alper said the new knowledge about the cognitive underpinnings of spirituality could -- and should -- reshape organized religion as we know it. 'If spirituality is an instinct, we should look at it as such, and see that we temper the extremities of the instinct.' " It may be that Alper (author of _The "God" Part of the Brain_) has been misquoted here; if not, the statement risks causing confusion. The term "instinct" has a number of meanings -- some of them mutually contradictory -- and is a poor choice. The newsletter goes on to quote Alper apparently proposing that neurological universality of religion should mandate "a more global spirituality, a spirituality of the species..." That's comparable to linguists proposing that the neurological universality of human language should mandate a single global language.

3. Margaret Carter wrote to say that the question of determining the validity of a religious experience is discussed by C.S. Lewis in "Transposition," an essay in _The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses_. For example, she says, he discusses"the difficulty of explaining the difference between glossolalia as hysterical gibberish and the same phenomenon as an outpouring of the Holy Spirit..." She notes that Lewis doesn't offer a method for _proving_ that an experience is religious rather than pathological.

QUOTES & COMMENTS

1. The Harry Potter series continues to make religious news and inspire new books. From the bestselling _Harry Potter and the Bible: The Menace Behind the Magick_, by Richard Abanes -- which explains "dangerous messages" in the series that parents need to educate their children about -- to Connie Neal's _What's a Christian to do with Harry Potter?_, which presents suggestions for using the series as a tool for evangelism. Neal is quoted in _Religion Bookline_ for 5/22/01 claiming that the Harry Potter stories are now "an integrated part of the language of this generation." A Harry Potter forum will be offered at this summer's Christian Booksellers Association international convention.

Suppose that Neal is correct about the Harry Potter stories being "an integrated part of the language" for this generation of children (and presumably for the series' adult readers as well). That doesn't seem to me to be of much significance. Except for "local color" items (placenames, character's names, the game of Quidditch), nothing in the series is new. Many other writers have written about wizards and charms and spells and potions, about "forces" both light and dark, about flying on broomsticks, about magic "portals" that let you into different worlds, and so on; Ursula K. Le Guin and Jane Yolen (among others) published books about youngsters going to wizardry schools long before the Harry Potter series appeared.

2. Considerably more significant, it seems to me, is the impact being made by the _Left Behind_ series. Because many (perhaps most) people aren't familiar with exactly what their denomination believes about the "end times," they're accepting information presented in the _Left Behind_ books without realizing that it's in conflict with the teachings of their own churches. This is a powerful cultural influence; current sales figures show more than 27 million copies sold for the series (more copies than the Harry Potter series has sold). I think we can safely assume that kids who read the _Left Behind_ series for children are even less well informed about their denomination's end-times doctrine than adults are. According to _Religion Bookline_ for 4/3/01, the _Left Behind_ books "present a premillennial dispensationist view of the end times, in which characters get a second chance for salvation after the first wave of Christians are 'raptured' into heaven."

3. There has been a flood of recent stories about the Vatican's new translation guidelines ("The Authentic Liturgy: On the Use of Vernacular Languages in the Publication of the Books of the Roman Liturgy"). These are the first such guidelines since 1969, and they really rein in the translator; they appear to me to flatly forbid the use of gender-neutral (inclusive) language in translation. The position taken is that inclusive language is not part of the normal process of language change in this world; instead, it is part of the ideological agenda of radical feminism and New Age religions and is therefore unacceptable. I'll be coming back to this in later issues of the newsletter after I've had an opportunity to read more materials; in the meantime, your input would be very welcome. [You can read a brief report titled "Vatican Cracks Down on Liturgical Translations" at http://www.cwnews.com/news/getstory.cfm?recnum=5450&auth=Subscriber.] Sample: "The new Vatican instruction specifically says that translators: Should not adapt the original Latin texts, but render them faithfully in the vernacular language; Should preserve gender-based references, especially in the Scriptures -- rather than changing texts to more 'inclusive' language; Should obtain Vatican approval at each step in the process of translation, editing, and adaptation of texts."

4. There's a story by Otto Selles in the 7-8/01 issue of _Books & Culture_ (pp. 8-11), titled "What's Cooking When Martha Stewart Meets the VeggieTales?" You may not know about the VeggieTales (from the company called Big Idea); they're a series of videos of Bible stories in which the roles are taken by vegetables and occasional objects -- as in "Dave and the Giant Pickle," in which Goliath is played by a giant pickle (formerly a cucumber, presumably) and the Philistines are played by French peas (still in the pod), or a version of David and Bathsheba in which the object of King David's desires is a rubber duck (i.e., bath-Sheba) that belongs to an Asparagus. So far, none of the VeggieTales have been stories that include Jesus as a character. Selles comments on that, on page 11: "I wonder, though, if the primary reason for avoiding the Gospel story is not the fear of being too preachy, but that of causing offense to VeggieTales' Christian audience. I suspect Big Idea realizes that while King David certainly got himself into a pickle at times, many viewers would not appreciate seeing Jesus portrayed as a crucified cucumber."

I agree. That would be awful. But _why_? Why should a nice clean wholesome vegetable seem so nearly blasphemous? And the question is, of course, what vegetable _would_ be acceptable to a Christian audience to represent Jesus? Jesus was not a snob at all; it's hard for me to imagine that he would have been offended by the concept of himself as vegetable. It may be that the only possible course is (as Big Idea has done) to avoid the issue entirely -- but it seems like a shame, and means avoiding some really good stories. It's curious that much sacred literature uses the metaphor of a deity as a flower -- a Lotus, for example, or a Rose, or a Lily -- but none (none that I know of, at least) as a vegetable.

ANOTHER LOVINGKINDNESS PRAYER

Holy One, have mercy on the neglectful;
on those who cause pain and suffering
not because it gives them pleasure,
not through malice or deliberate intent,
but through neglect,
because they are lazy,
or careless,
or unaware of what they ought to do,
or because they simply do not pay attention.
Transform them, and open their hearts.
Help them to understand what they have done
and to be truly sorry;
help them to change their ways.
And may everything that happens to them,
this day and this night,
be for the best.
Amen.

BUSINESS....

It won't surprise you to learn that our Internet costs have gone up again. There are a few things you could do that would help me keep the newsletters alive. (1) I'm not going to raise the price of network memberships; they stay at $5.00, and that $5.00 will still get you six issues a year of this newsletter. However, I'm now offering Supporting Memberships at $15.00 a year for members willing to renew at that rate. (2) You could find one or more new members for the network; if everybody found just one, we'd double the membership base and that would be extremely helpful. (3) You could plan on giving gift memberships for the coming holiday season (or any other occasion); I'm happy to offer three gift memberships for $10.00, and will send an appropriate gift card by snailmail for each one, in advance of the holiday of your choice. (4) You could make a tax-deductible donation to Lovingkindness. (5) You could share with me any ideas that you might have along these lines; your suggestions are always welcome.

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[E-mail newsletters by Suzette Haden Elgin for 2001 are: _The Linguistics & Science Fiction Newsletter_; _The Religious Language Newsletter_; and _The Verbal Self-Defense Newsletter_. Each $5.00 a year ($15.00 Supporting) for the six issues of the calendar year, by e-mail only, advertising-free; for more information or a free sample issue, send an e-mail request to OCLS@madisoncounty.net.]

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