March/April issue

THE RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE NEWSLETTER
Volume 1, Issue 2 -- March/April 2000

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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 (PO Box 1137, Huntsville, AR 72740-1137, e-mail OCLS@madisoncounty.net). It's available by e-mail only, in plain text, and is free to members of the Lovingkindness Network (annual dues, $5.00). For more information, contact OCLS; issues are posted at http://www. forlovingkindness.org.
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IN THIS ISSUE: Editor Notes; Book Notes; Cyberspace; Bible Translations; Metaphor Notes; Quotes & Comments

EDITOR NOTES: (1) There's been an electronic upheaval in our area, and our e-mail address from 2/28 on will be ocls@madisoncounty.com. (2) Many thanks for the materials you've been sending, and for your comments. To those of you who wrote to argue against my interpretation of the New Testament instruction to "Return good for evil," my thanks also; we will have to agree to disagree, but I always welcome your ideas. (3) A number of you wrote to complain about the asterisks I used in the first issue to indicate italics and asked me to use the more standard format [_X_] instead; I'm happy to do that.

BOOK NOTES

1. Recently I ordered a copy of a book by Dr. Paul Meier titled _Don't Let Jerks Get the Best of You_ (Thomas Nelson 1993, ISBN 0-8407-7596-2). Because religious language is so often part of verbal conflict, I'm always looking for books about verbal self-defense from the religious presses to recommend. This one was a disappointment. I knew I was going to be disappointed the minute I saw the table of contents, with Part I titled "Welcome To a World of Jerks -- and Masochists" and Part II titled "Six Steps Out of Masochism to Maturity," but I read it carefully anyway, cover to cover. The book is well-intentioned, but strikes me as a reformulation in religious language of the old party line which claims that when someone's language behavior causes you pain it's because something is wrong with you. [If any of you have suggestions for the "religious language verbal self-defense list," I would welcome them. I have a shelf of suggested ones, but the only two I feel comfortable with are Richard Walters' _How to Say Hard Things the Easy Way_ (Word 1991) and David S. Cunningham's _Faithful Persuasion_ (U. of Notre Dame 1990). The first is a self-help book; the second is scholarly and technical.]

2. I've recommended Gunilla Norris' book _Being Home: A Book of Meditations_ before; I want to recommend it again. The title is a bit misleading; I would describe it as a book of psalms and prayers in the tradition of Celtic prayer. You know how Celtic prayers are written to be prayed while you milk the cow or scrub out the barn? Their age gives them a distance that makes them charming, but when people try to do that for today -- prayers to use while checking your e-mail, or filling out your tax return -- the result is usually disconcerting at best, and rarely charming, let alone useful. Norris has tried, however, and succeeded; I think she has invented a perfect form for the contemporary psalm. (I just wish there were a companion _Being At Work_ volume too.) In this age of shoddy books that fall apart when you look at them, _Being Home_ is a beautifully-made book that will last for generations and is a pleasure to the hand as well as the eye and ear. It's published by Bell Tower, 1991; the ISBN is 0-517-58159-0; I treasure my copy. Here's one brief example from page 13, to give you the flavor.

"Looking in the Mirror"

When I look in the mirror
let me try to see what You see --
the self You gave me to be.
Let me find the courage to carry
both the dark and the light of it.

In whatever small ways I can,
let me mirror Your will.

CYBERSPACE

1. Recommended: John David Smith's "The days when God wore blue and gray," at http://www.news-observer.com/daily/1999/11/07/arts06.html. It's a review essay explaining how it was that both sides in the Civil War -- and both military and civilians on both sides -- firmly believed that God was on _their_ side in the conflict and that the conflict was a just and holy war. (The book reviewed is _Religion and the American Civil War_, edited by Randall M. Miller et al.) You'll find a link at the end to a printer-friendly version, a feature that I always appreciate. ## Also recommended, at http://go.wired.com/wired/archive/7.11/ persinger.html/mg199947, an article titled "This Is Your Brain On God."
2. If you need to reach a monk at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, more than two hours outside of Albuquerque at the end of a red-clay road where no power or phone lines choose to go, you can follow the instruction on a hand-carved wooden sign that reads, "Ring this bell." Or, writes Joshua Cooper Ramo, "you can send e-mail, in care of porter@christdesert.org." Because the monks are online, powered by the sun. Ramo writes in an article titled "Finding God on the Web," pp. 60-69 of the 12/16/96 issue of _Time_. The Internet has become a spiritual bazaar, he says, where (page 64) "Catholics suddenly find themselves keyboard-to-keyboard with devil worshippers," Jews modem-to-modem with Islamic fundamentalists." This, he says, is going to lead to cyberchurches. And on page 65: "Even holy texts have begun to be adapted to the new technology. The interconnection of religious documents through so-called hyperlinks has produced a new form of scholarship called 'hypertheology.' I was pleased to learn from this excellent article that the three computers running the Vatican's website 24 hours a day are nicknamed "Raphael, Michael and Gabriel," and that that site's initial "e-mail the Pope" feature proved "far too popular." Good reading, with useful information, though URLs may no longer be current; four years is a cyber-eon.

3. At http://www.baylor.edu/~Scott_Moore/handoubts/language.html, you'll find a single page titled "Religious Language" offering eight traditional answers to the question of how reliable human language is when used to express religious perceptions, each with a brief definition and source.[Example: "2. Language is univocal. There is no problem. Words which refer to God and to humanity have exactly the same meaning. Carl F. H. Henry holds this position."] Recommended at the end is Stiver's _The Philosophy of Religious Language: Sign, Symbol, and Story_ (Blackwell 1996), which Morre says provides "an excellent treatment of these issues and a thorough introduction to the philosophical problems surrounding the nature and use of religious language."

BIBLE TRANSLATIONS

1. In a brochure for the _Inclusive New Testament_ -- where Colossians 3:18 begins with "You who are in committed relationships, be submissive to each other" -- a minister expresses his delight that it opens with "...the family record of Jesus Christ, descendant of Bath-sheba and David..." The testament (which I haven't seen yet) is published by the Priests for Equality; 1-800-746-1160.

2. A number of you wrote to ask me why, when I'm reading the Bible, I insist on reading the creaking old King James version. Let me quote scholars Robert Alter and Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, who tell us that the King James is "the closest approach for its English readers to the original" and "the only writerly translation we have....the only one in which a reader can believe that great writers were at work." Or I can quote the writer in whose article those quotations appear, David Lyle Jeffrey, in "Genesis: Warts and All," pp. 77-81 of the 4/26/99 _Christianity Today_. Jeffrey says, on page 81: "Never mind the few lexical bloopers; no other English translation carries the authority and literary power of the scriptural 'voice' half so effectively as the KJV." And here's Alter again, in an article sent to me by Hal Davis: "English translations of the Bible in our century have concentrated on two related goals: to make the ancient text more accessible to modern readers and to make its meanings perfectly transparent." Which he says, gives us translations in a style "that wanders uncertainly between the language of the daily newspaper and that of a bureaucratic manual." (From "In the Beginning Was the Word -- and They've Been Arguing About it Ever Since," _NY Times Magazine_ for 10/22/95, pp. 64-67; on page 66.) I keep reading translations, and being appalled by how tedious and awful and clunky they are, and fleeing back to the King James. Yesterday's mail brought me my long awaited (paperback) copy of the Everett Fox translation of the first five books of the Old Testament -- an incredible bargain at $25.00 for its 1024 pages; it has had rave reviews from very picky scholars, and I'm hoping to discover that this one is a delight. We'll see. If you want a copy, it's _The Five Books of Moses_, by Everett Fox, Shocken Books (just released -- why its copyright page shows 1995 I cannot say); the ISBN is 0-8052-1119-5.

3. Some time back, Pam and Allen Munro sent me their translation of the Christmas Story into San Lucas Quiavini Zapotec (SLQZ). Here's something interesting from footnote #4: "SLQZ presents a special problem for Bible translation. The language has six different third-person pronouns, organized in a respect hierarchy." Translators have to choose among the three categories of respectful, formal, and reverential pronouns for Joseph and Mary and Jesus; the shepherds, footnote #8 tells us, "are referred to throughout with distal (nonrespectful) pronouns." ("Nonrespectful" does not mean "disrespectful.")

4. Michael Patrick O'Connor wrote to object to my saying that "pisseth" is in the King James "over and over and over," pointing out that it's there only six times. I stand by my judgment. Given the fact that finding "pisseth" only _one_ time in a book would be enough to get it soundly trashed there days, six times strikes me as a _lot_ of times.

METAPHOR NOTES

1. Leonard Sweet warns that "religion must learn to cope with a whole new world, one in which the old language, metaphors, symbols and priorities have all been replaced." Sweet has written three books about that, and they are: _Soul Tsunami: Sink or Swim in New Millenium Culture_; _Aqua Church: Essential Leadership Arts for Piloting Your Church in Today's Fluid Culture_; and Soul Salsa: The Art of Living Soulfully, or How Not to Become a Pew-Sitting Toad_. Writer Michael Kress continues with "Sweet says the basis for understanding the major cultural shift is grasping the idea that our controlling metaphors have changed from those that are land-based to water-based: a landscape has turned into a seascape, as an ever-changing fluid culture has replaced the fixed notions of the past." I'm intrigued by the landscape-to-seascape hypothesis, from which "Soul Tsunami" and "Aqua Church" follow plausibly. I like the "pew-sitting toad" phrase, and have seen toads near various bodies of water from time to time, though not near the sea. However, fitting a sea of salsa into the framework isn't easy. (The source is a section of a long "Religion Update" in the 11/15/99 _Publishers Weekly_, on page S14.)

2. Laura Mallard sent me a copy of a story by Gustav Niebuhr titled "Hell Is Getting a Makeover From Catholics," in which the Jesuit magazine _La Civilta Cattolica_ is quoted saying that Hell is not a place but a state -- a "state of being, in which a person suffers from the deprivation of God." I've read several articles recently in popular media presenting the argument between very traditional Protestant denominations which insist on the "Hell is an eternal torture chamber" metaphor -- dominated by a lake of fire -- and the new Catholic view. As imagery "state of deprivation" can't compete with "eternal torture chamber," obviously. Something more compelling will have to be devised.

3. If you go to http://www.uia.org and click on "Document Index," it will take you to a paper by Anthony J. N. Judge titled "Towards an Ecology of Spiritual Traditions as Articulated by a Dynamic System of Metaphors." It begins with an overview of the spiritual function of metaphors, and a brief discussion of methodology. Then Judge sets out a possible "dynamic system of metaphors" to show us what he means, describing "spiritual concord" as: an ecology of options; a physiology of interdependent organs; a nuclear fusion reactor; an organic module of variable geometry; a pattern of circulating traffic; and a crop rotation cycle. Highly recommended. Obligatory, to my mind, for anyone searching for a better metaphor with which to counter an existing one.

4. You'll be famliar with the idea of the "attractor," from chaos theory -- you can't escape it, since it fascinates the media. It comes up in an interview with Rupert Sheldrake in the Autumn 1995 issue of _The Quest_ (pp. 27-31 and page 82), titled "Spiritual Practice and Morphic Fields"; the interviewer was Dan Menkin. On page 31: "In the Western tradition, God would be the supreme attractor. ... So the Divine Attractor is not just something that is above us, that we reach by a kind of vertical takeoff. It is also something that draws the individual and the collective life of humanity through history."

QUOTES & COMMENTS:

1. The 6/94 _East Bay Express_ had a fine review (badly titled "A Gathering of Spiritual Flowers") written by Damaris Moore; the book was _Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women_, edited by Jane Hirshfield, Harper Collins 1994. Moore writes that the poems are "all impact....immediate perception unbewildered by mind." She tells us that "the poems insist that it is impossible for the words to convey even a shadow of their experience." And then she says: "Mystics find it good form to preface their writings with complaints about language's futility. What overcomes their scruples is the imperative of praise." My thanks to Sally Lloyd for the copy.

2. Frances Green sent me a _Publishers Weekly_ discussion of the new subgenre of "Christian romance fiction," with something from editor Karen Ball of Tyndale House that took me aback. Ball is quoted as saying that the books "show how people can incorporate the Lord in their relationships" -- so far, so plausible -- and then, that the books "show that romance is a triangle experience -- between a man, woman and God." Never mind the "between" instead of "among"; in spite of the fact that it comes from an editor, I don't think she intends to make any theological proposal with that "between." But the idea that man/woman/God constitutes a "triangle" strikes me as evidence of Tin Ear Syndrome. "Triangles," when composed of human beings, are usually unsavory; the only divine threesome the phrase will bring to mind is the Trinity, and that's shocking; "triangle" implies that man, woman, and God are equal in the relationship. It could hardly be a worse choice for either word or analogy. I hope the editor was misquoted -- and I hope that's not the standard line for writers of Christian romances. ("When Romance Gets Religion," by Michelle Bearden, 11/20/95; page 57.)

3. One of the perennial sources of misunderstanding between the genders in our culture revolves around their different definitions for the word "game." For most men, games are very serious business, and it's acceptable to excuse behavior that might otherwise be offensive by saying that "It's just the way the game is played." For women, the word "game" carries features like [+TRIVIAL] and [+FRIVOLOUS]. That the culture is on the men's side is shown by the salaries paid to professionals in the popular sports, and the respectful attention given to the ramblings of athletes interviewed during and after games on television. Whether phenomena such as the new women's basketball and soccer professional teams will close the linguistic gender gap, it's too soon to say. In this context, I want to quote from a review by John D. Witvliet of Bernhard Lang's _Sacred Games: A History of Christian Worship_. Witvliet writes: "_Sacred Games_ is a phenomenological study of the 'ritual idiom of Christianity.' Lang organizes the book as a series of 'six interpretive essays' based on a 'typology of ritual acts' that identifies six paradigmatic, widely observable actions, six 'sacred games': praise, prayer, sermon, sacrifice, sacrament, and spiritual ecstasy." And Witvliet is not just positive about all this, he goes into raptures over it. Only after many paragraphs does he make a concession, saying that "Analyzing a subject as profound and many-sided as worship requires a concept or image that is at once apt and startling. The image of worship as a game...may suggest something altogether too casual, trivial, or shallow." To me, the idea that praise, prayer, sermon, sacrifice, sacrament, and spiritual ecstasy should be called games is unacceptable; perhaps that's because I'm sixty-three and have never played a team sport voluntarily. However, a warning is called for: If we attach "game" as a label to these six religious actions, it will be very difficult not to also attach the "Get out there and win!" ethic to them, along with the idea that anything goes as long as it's "the way the game is played." Makes me nervous. (Source: "At Play in the House of the Lord," by John D. Witvliet, in _Books & Culture_ for 11-12/98, pp. 22-25; the quotes are from pages 24 and 25.)

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