March/April 2002 Newsletter

THE RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE NEWSLETTER
Volume 3, Issue 2 -- March/April 2002
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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; thanks to a generous donation, all issues are posted at http://www.forlovingkindness.org. To join the Lovingkindness Network, send $5.00 (annual dues for each calendar year) to OCLS; please be sure to include your e-mail address with your check, money order, or credit card information. (Supporting Memberships are $15.00.) Donations to LK are tax-deductible. For more information, or to request a free sample issue, contact OCLS.
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IN THIS ISSUE: Editor's Note; Network Input (on Prayer); Booknotes; Prayer Update, Ongoing; Cyberstuff; Quotes & Comments; Teaching Story

EDITOR'S NOTE

Thank you for all the renewals, for the gift memberships and Supporting Memberships, and for all the fine and useful materials that you've been sending; I'm very grateful.

NETWORK INPUT (ON PRAYER)

1. From Karen Stroup:

"The fact is that practically, I most often _do_ ask people whether I may pray for them. .. But theologically, I cannot agree to be constrained by someone's permission to pray for her or him. In some gospel stories, Jesus asks the person concerned 'What do you want me to do for you?'; but other times, he performs miracles without the person's permission. That's the first reason. The second is the command to pray for my enemies, who are, often by definition, people whose permission I cannot gain one way or another. And third is my general theology of prayer. If I conceived of prayer as a set of marching directions for God, which God would then follow, then I can see an ethical problem there. I'm not foolish enough, though, to believe that God follows my orders or even my desires as I pray them. .. What I do when I pray is to tell God my desire for someone's well-being, and to ask that God make that well-being occur in whatever fashion God knows is best."

2. From Jim White:

"I'm not prepared to accept a rule or ethical principle that says I can't pray for whomever I want. If you stumble going through a doorway, should I wait for your informed consent before grabbing you to keep you from falling? Should I wait for informed consent of lung cancer sufferers before sending a donation?"

3. From Pat Mathews:

"In my tradition, to pray for someone without their explicit permission is as bad as doing magic for or to them without explicit permission: it's a violation of their free will."

4. Margaret L. Carter wrote to say that C.S. Lewis explicityly addresses the prayer questions we've been examining, in his essay "The Efficacy of Prayer" (_Fern-Seed and Elephants_ 1977), and to discuss what Lewis had to say, I'll be coming back to her letter in another issue, but wanted to give you the reference now.

BOOKNOTES

1. _Sunday's Silence_, by Gina B. Nahai, Harcourt 2001; ISBN 0-15-100627-X.

This is the story of Adam Watkins, a man raised among "the snake-handling Holiness sect in Appalachia" who returns to that environment (after a long absence) to investigate the murder of his preacher father. It's the story of the suspect in the murder -- a very unusual woman named Blue, married to an elderly linguist -- and her relationship with Adam. I ordered the book for its portrayal of the Holiness sect, and was sorry to find that that material was not its main focus; however, I can recommend the book nonetheless. It's interesting, informative, a good read -- and strange. I had read about the snake-handling before; I had _not_ known about the practice of drinking lye and kerosene and arsenic, or the handling of fire. Researched by the author, not just in books but in Appalachia. Here's a small sample from pp. 66-67:

"The preacher went on to claim that the Holy Ghost gave man the power to conquer evil. To prove this he quoted from the Gospel of Mark the words of Jesus to his disciples immediately prior to his ascension: 'And these signs shall follow them that believe; in my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.

Little Sam left the church moved by the preacher's conviction and intrigued by the meaning of the words in Mark. ... One morning he climbed atop White Oak Mountain, to a spot called Rainbow Rock, and beckoned the Lord. 'Give me a sign,' he asked. 'Tell me what to do.' There, before him, straight out of the Pentecostal preacher's sermon, was a rattlesnake."

2. _Screen Door Jesus & other stories_, by Christopher Cook; Host Publications (Austin TX) 2001; ISBN 0-924047-21-6.

I strongly recommend this book; it's what "Christian fiction" (or fiction of any other faith) ought to be. Not every story in this collection is of the same high quality, but they're all good; "Star Man" is spectacularly good, and reading it is an experience to treasure. Cook's ear for the religious language of East Texas and Louisiana is, in my opinion, flawless, and he writes it down in a way that makes you hear it as you read, without being obtrusive. Here are two quotes from "Star Man," to give you the flavor. Doss and Luther and Little Red, headed home on Christmas Eve, have stopped for coffee at a rural Waffle House in the middle of the night; suddenly they're confronted by a hydrocephalic small child on a tricycle, the child of the waitress (who has told them that she named her child Star Man).

" 'I bet tha's Star Man,' said Luther. 'Whatcha wanna bet?' He put out a long arm with a forefinger extended and the child gripped it with both stubby hands without expression. Doss and Little Red watched Luther wiggle his finger, saying, 'You the Star Man, punkin?' The child tightened his hold, his blank gaze focused on the tall man's grinning face. 'What I t'ought, yeah,' Luther said, and he leaned out the booth, reached over with his other arm and gathered up the child, pulled him close and sat him on a knee." (page 69)

" 'Reason for the mess, seems to me,' said Little Red, speaking up, 'is cause we got a choice. People go and choose what's wrong, that's the mess. Only Jesus forgives us, and that makes it all right. Long as you believe.'
Luther took off his welder's cap, studied its narrow brim. 'Maybe you right, _cher_. Maybe so. Me, I'm holding that child tonight... Whole time I'm t'inking, this baby ain't never gonna believe, no.'
'Well, special case like that --'
'And he don't have to,' Luther said, '-pas du tout_. Cause Star Man, he is baby Jesus, for true.'
The tall thin man lifted both arms and gazed at what had so recently held divinity, then put on his cap, pulled it snug over his head and walked off toward the rig, saying, 'Baby Jesus, right there in my big ol' ugly hands.' " (page 73)

3. _The Great Poems of the Bible: A Reader's Companion with New Translations_, by James L. Kugel; The Free Press 1999; ISBN 0-684-85774-X.

I don't know how to tell you how fine this book is -- it's one of those books where you need to be able to quote the whole thing. It has eighteen poems from the Bible, in the author's translations, followed by his commentaries. It has a very clear explanation of what "poetry" means in the Bible, and how it was constructed. It has a fine section on the question of why the wicked prosper ["In biblical times Jeremiah's opening sentence sounded more like: 'You always win, O Lord, whenever I take You to court; still, I must institute proceedings against you one more time' "] and another on what it means to be a prophet. It has an analysis of the religious language in _The Wizard of Oz_ , following Psalm 104. ["What is surprising is not that _The Wonderful Wizard of Oz_, along with quite a few other books of the last few centuries, have in one way or another evoked the doubts that nag at people's faith. Rather, what is remarkable is that there is not some ancient Israelite equivalent, some text somewhere in the Hebrew Bible that, even if only as indirectly as Oz, at least raises the question of God's existence or delicately, allegorically, suggests that perhaps a great fraud is being perpetrated. But there is not. Job and Ecclesiastes question God's justice, Jeremiah may wish even to take Him to court, but His existence, it seems, was simply not open to question, not even perceived as a possible subject of discourse."] Recommended enthusiastically.

PRAYER UPDATE, ONGOING

1. In the 11-12/01 issue I wrote about a recent double-blind research study on the effects of prayer in reproductive medicine, where the data are alleged to show a doubling of the success rate for in vitro fertilization in women who were prayed for. None of the 199 women, or their physicians, or the medical personnel involved in their care, knew that a study of prayer was being conducted. I added that this apparent "nonlocal" effect was inconvenient both for medical professionals and for mainstream science. This brought me a bushel of letters -- enough to write a book with, far too many to write a newsletter with. Two threads immediately emerged in the letters: (1) a controversy over whether it was ethical, or even permissible, to pray for people without their consent; and (2) a statement by one of our Network scientists to the effect that what makes the results of the study (if accurate) inconvenient isn't the "nonlocal" aspect -- gravity, he pointed out, is nonlocal; rather, the problem is that the effects would exceed the speed of light, and that's not allowed.

I've put a few lines from your letters in the Network Input section this time, and I will be printing more (and quoting from other letters as well) in future issues -- but I think it would be useful at this point to do a sort of rough summary of your thinking, to organize the discussion. The positions taken in your letters to me so far can be summarized roughly like this.

On the ethics controversy:

A1. Prayer is the practice of magic; you don't do magic on someone's behalf without permission -- period.

A2. Prayer is a religious practice, not magic, and we are in fact explicitly _commanded_ to pray for people without their permission (as in "pray for them who despitefully use you"); therefore, it's permissible. [Note: However, most people feel that although it's permissible in ordinary life it's unethical as part of medical research. This would require some further exploration; it's not obvious or self-evident.]

On the speed of light issue:

B1. Prayer that has effects is divine intervention; therefore, the speed of light is irrelevant.

B2. Prayer that has effects is magic; therefore the speed of light is irrelevant.

B3. Prayer that has effects is divine intervention; however, God created the laws of physics and does not violate them -- therefore, the speed of light is relevant. [Note: Those who take this position are strongly inclined to believe that prayer _doesn't_ have effects; they suspect that the research is flawed, that we are misunderstanding what happens, that the claim that there are effects is simply false, or some other explanation along those lines.]

B4. Prayer that has effects is a force of some kind (like gravity) that humans are able to exert or tap into but that we don't yet understand, having nothing to do with divine intervention; therefore, the speed of light is relevant.

I think that I've stated all the positions and stated them accurately, although I've had no choice but to leave out details and arguments. If I've left out anything crucial, please do tell me so; I'll put a correction in the next issue. And I would like very much to have another bushel of letters from you on the topic. It seems to me that "What is prayer?" and "Does prayer work?" are two of the most important questions that could possibly be asked; it seems to me that you're saying very interesting things about those two questions.

2. Those who take Position B3 or B4 aren't going to be happy about this next item; I'm not sure it's _safe_ for the B3 group to read it. But there it is, and ignoring it won't help. From "The Power of Prayer," by Gavin E. Jarvis, _HMS Beagle_ Issue 120, 2/15/02:

"In a fascinating article, Leibovici appears to have demonstrated, using a double-blind, randomized, controlled trial, that a prayer said for individuals with bloodstream infection 4-10 years previously can significantly affect the duration of fever and the length of stay in hospital. He randomized 3,393 patients who had suffered from a bloodstream infection between 1990 and 1996 into either an intervention prayer group or a control group. Assessment of the baseline characteristics of the patients indicated that the randomization had been effective; yet, following the intervention, made in July 2000, there was a significant beneficial effect on the prayer group 4-10 years previously. Leibovici concludes that 'remote, retroactive intercessory prayer... should be considered for use in clinical practice.' "

_HMS Beagle_ is unable to find fault with the study. You can read "The Power of Prayer" at http://news.bmn.com/hmsbeagle/120/feature 6?print=yes. You can read the original research article ("Effects of remote, retroactive intercessory prayer on outcomes in patients with bloodstream infection: randomised controlled trial," by Leonard Leibovici, _British Medical Journal_ 323:1450-1451) at http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=61047, or on a link at the HMS Beagle site. And I'd be pleased to hear from you after you do.

3. My thanks to Kathe Rauch for alerting me to the "World Prayers" site at http://www.worldprayers.org. The introduction at the site says its purpose is "to gather the great prayers written by the spiritual visionaries of our planet into an online database representing all life-affirming traditions." The prayers are divided into Adorations, Celebrations, Invocations, and Meditations; they are further divided by various faiths and various topics. I have three comments about the site. First: I found it a bit hard to navigate -- it does strange things, without warning -- but it doesn't do anything really infuriating. Second: It's truly beautiful, and beautifully designed. Third: So far as I can determine, it isn't possible to print out any of the prayers. That surprised me. Why create a database of great prayers from all traditions and lock them up? Especially when all anybody has to do is copy and paste them, meanwhile feeling annoyed at getting an ugly copy instead of a handsome one? If you find that you _can_ print the prayers, please let me know and I'll retract my objections.

4. _Christian Century_ for 10/24-31/01 had a short essay by Carol Zaleski on page 28, titled "360-degree prayers." [The class of prayers that ask protection "before me, behind me, above me, below me, to the left of me, to the right of me" and so on., including especially the Celtic "breastplate" prayers.] Zaleski points out, in the context of the claim that there are no atheists in foxholes, that "now the whole world is a foxhole." She says "Our familiar religious idiom of peace and reconciliation is not adequate to the way most Americans understand the present crisis" and she says we have a special need now for prayers of protection. And: "However questionable the use of prayers as invisibility spells, they speak to a legitimate need to encicle ourselves in a mantle of grace and guidance, to commit our families, our communities and the armed forces to the protection of Christ and all the saints. Rightly used, such prayers steel us against danger but do not harden us against others. For included within the circle of protection is the entire world of relations with others..." She gives us an example of an Islamic 360-degree prayer: "O God appoint for me light in my heart and light in my tomb and light before me and light behind me; light on my right hand and light on my left; light above me and light below me; light in my sight and light in my perception." And she closes with this: "May God grant us all a breastplate of light. Never has there been greater need for it." (Zaleski has a book on prayer, _The Language of Paradise_, coming out in 2003.)

5. Finally: "Ponder this -- keep it in mind. If you beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it." That's Mark Twain, in "The War Prayer," pp. 30-32 of _The Plough Reader_ for Winter 2002; on page 32.

CYBERSTUFF

1. The Bible Gateway site (at http://bible.gospelcom.net) offers complete -- and searchable -- Bibles online in 14 languages, as well as various Bibles in audio format. You can also subscribe to a number of newsletters "for Christian scholars and educators" at the main site -- Gospelcom.net.

2. The Buddhist Peace Fellowship site offers Buddhist perspectives on war, peace, and social justice, with a large section responding to the September 11th terrorist attacks and their aftermath; the URL is http://www.bpf.org.

3, Some years ago, Michael Albert wrote an article for _Z Magazine_ , mostly about universal grammar (the core of elements and principles that are found in every known human language). In the article he claimed that Chomsky has proposed the following: Just as there is a universal human grammar of language, there is a universal human grammar of morality. And as is true for language acquisition, there is a critical period for the acquisition of that grammar of morality, the input to which is the morality that is modeled for infants and children by the adults in their environment. Chomsky is quoted on the last page: "For people committed to control and manipulation it is quite useful to believe that human beings have no intrinsic moral and intellectual nature, that they are simply objects to be shaped by state and private managers and ideologues who of course perceive what is good and right." We rarely hear anything about this strand of Chomsky's thinking; you can read the article, "Universal Grammar and Linguistics," at http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/grammar.htm.

4. There's an interesting brief article titled "Religious Language" at http://www.faithnet.freeserve.co.uk/language.htm.
Recommended. The page also takes you to a set of extremely useful links to essays (like this one) on a variety of religious topics; click on "Site Map" at the end of the essay to get to the links.

5. For a list of themes proposed for a conference on "The Sociology of Language and Religion," go to http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/artshum/engmod/ colloquium/themes_of_interest.asp. Example (from topic #8): "Changing discourses of sermonization -- from orthodox routines to post-modern creativity; 'born againism'; the shift from the threat of hell fire in the after-life to the enticement of plenty for the chosen -- religion and glamour ..."

QUOTES & COMMENTS

1. My thanks to Hal Davis for "Women's seders create new traditions for Passover, by Beth J. Harpaz, _Dayton Daily News_ for 4/7/01. Harpaz writes:

"Traditional seders place a cup of wine on the table for the Prophet Elijah; women's seders also add a cup of water in honor of Miriam. ... Women's seders have also added an orange to the symbolic food on the seder plate, which traditionally includes horseradish to represent the bitterness of slavery, and parsley to represent new life, hope and the spring season. The orange refers to an anecdote from the era before women were allowed to become rabbis. According to the story, a male rabbi once said, 'A woman belongs on the bimah (the lectern at the front of a synagogue) like an orange belongs on the seder plate.' "

2. If you haven't yet seen it, I recommend the article by Daniel Lazare on pp. 39-47 of the 3/02 _Harper's_ titled "False Testament: Archaeology refutes the Bible's claim to history." It's going to stir up a hornet's nest, despite _Harper's_ small readership, and it's going to cause a lot of pain. I won't say any more about it in this crowded issue, and will wait for the Letters To the Editor in the April issue. Here's a quote from the opening: "In the last century or so, archaeologists have seen one settled assumption after another concerning who the ancient Israelites were and where they came from proved false. Rather than a band of invaders who fought their way into the Holy Land, the Israelites are now thought to have been an indigenous culture... Abraham, Isaac, and the other patriarchs appear to have been spliced together out of various pieces of local lore." I suspect that unless the article is skillfully ignored to death -- which would require the opposing factions to have sense enough to hold their peace -- it will cause archaeologists to rival linguists for the Most Negative Public Image awards. My thanks to Pat Mathews for the copy.

3. Here's a scrap from Dostoevsky's _The Brothers Karamazov_, quoted on p. 39 of the Winter 2002 issue of _The Plough Reader_:

"If the evil-doing of men moves you to indignation and overwhelming distress, even to a desire for vengeance on the evil-doers, shun above all things that feeling. Go at once and seek suffering for yourself, as though you were yourself guilty of that wrong. Accept that suffering and bear it and your heart will find comfort, and you will understand that you, too, are guilty, for you might have been a light to the evil-doers, even as the one man sinless, and you were not a light to them. If you had been a light, you would have lightened the path for others too, and the evil-doer might perhaps have been saved by your light from his sin."

4. From "Hard Questions for Peacemakers: Theologians of nonviolence wrestle with how to resist terrorism," by Jim Wallis, pp. 29-33, _Sojourners_ for 1-2/02:

"So how do we stop them? How do we prevent them from killing more innocents? And most poignantly, how do advocates of nonviolence try to stop them? For nonviolence to be credible, it must answer the questions that violence purports to answer, but in a better way." (p. 30)

"In the modern world of warfare, where far more civilians die than soldiers, war has become ethically obsolete as a way of resolving humankind's inevitable conflicts. ... I am increasingly convinced that the way forward may be found in the wisdom gained in the practice of conflict resolution and the energy of a faith-based commitment to peacemaking. " (p. 32)

"We simply haven't trained the churches, or anybody else for that matter, in the crucial theology and practive of active nonviolence, says [Walter] Wink. That must now become our priority."

4. I recommend taking a look at the papers and materials of the Human Values Project, at the website of the Union of International Organizations. Try "Human Values Project: Summary" (at http://www.uia.org/iis.docs/iiv.htm), which says that "The purpose of this project is to register a comprehensive range of values with which people identify, to which they are attracted or which they reject as abhorrent"; here you'll find links to their charts of "constructive value words" [peace, harmony, beauty .... ], "destructive value words" [conflict, depravity ... ], "value polarities" [agreement/disagreement, freedom/restraint ... ], and "value types" [groups of value polarities]. Try "Human Values Project -- Comments: values as attractors," at http://www.uia.org/values/52attrac.htm, which draws from the chaos theory concept of strange attractors. The approach and methodology for the project is described at http://www.uia.org/values/ 31met91.htm.

5. My thanks to Laura Mallard for "Notes on God's Violence," by Catherine Madsen, available online at http://www.crosscurrents.org/madsen0701.htm. Hard reading, and I'm sure it was hard writing as well. Here are two brief samples.

"The fact that forgiveness is in the picture at all forces our attention to the most repellent realization of all: in the terms of the biblical story, God has a case against the people. His ferocity is directed against real sins: the neglect of the poor, the oppression of workers, the evasion of filial duty. God does not do violence as Zeus does, to satisfy his lusts; he does it on behalf of the vulnerable. Abraham Herschel argues in _The Prophets_ that he does it to show the unmindful oppressors what vulnerability is: to show them that poverty, hunger and homelessness are that fearful, that shattering to the poor. He goes on reenacting the trauma on us till we refuse to reenact it on them."

"A woman can walk away from a violent husband (sometimes, but not always, with the hope of escaping him), but we cannot leave the universe; there is no divorce from God."

6. I wanted to discuss some quotes about Zondervan's latest attempt to bring out a translation of the Bible that's just the tiniest tad less masculine in its language, and the controversy that's raising, but that will have to wait. This issue of the newsletter has outgrown its available space. Next time. In the meantime, if you see interesting discussion of the _Today's New International Version_ (available any minute now), I'd be happy to have a look. Thanks to all of you who have already sent materials.

TEACHING STORY

The Holy One, seeing that the hearts of his people were as hard as flint, said: "I need one million who are willing to die of starvation before their third birthday, their images blazing before the eyes of my people -- to break open their hearts as water breaks open stone." Without hesitation, one million unborn souls stepped forward, each one saying, "Here I am; send me." Blessed are the volunteers.

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