THE RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE NEWSLETTER
Volume 7, Issue 3 -- May/June 2006
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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 generous donations, all issues are posted at http://www.forlovingkindness.org. To join the network and receive its newsletter, 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 Lovingkindness are tax-deductible. **Payments can now be made through Paypal if that's your preference (and for members outside the U.S. that's the simplest method); our Paypal account is ocls@madisoncounty.net.** For more information, to request a free sample issue, or to cancel the newsletter, please e-mail ocls@madisoncounty.net.
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IN THIS ISSUE: Editor's Note; Network Input; Book Review: _The Left Hand of God_; Quotes & Comments; One Step Forward, Six Steps Polysyllabically Back; Cyberspace.

EDITOR'S NOTE

As I begin working on this newsletter today, the lexical item from religious language that is at the center of my attention is the word "messianic," used by Seymour Hersh to characterize the way George W. Bush allegedly feels about a military effort to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities. And then there is Charles Krauthammer's statement in "Today Tehran, Tomorrow the World" (page 96, _Time_ for 4/3/06) telling readers that Iran's President "is a fervent believer in the imminent reappearance of the 12th Imam, Shi'ism's version of the Messiah" and believes "that the Islamic revolution's raison d'etre is to prepare the way for the messianic redemption, which in his eschatology is preceded by worldwide upheaval and chaos." Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Krauthammer writes, is reported to be saying in meetings that "the end of history is only two or three years away." What may be happening by the time I _send_ the newsletter, I have no way of knowing -- and I am deeply grateful for that.

As always, I thank you for all the materials that you've been sending me. They make this newsletter possible.

NETWORK INPUT

1. From Patricia Mathews, in response to the item about men objecting to "cozy" churches and church services...

"I agree -- men might be turned off by the coziness of the modern church, and I daresay the blandness that characterized a lot of liberal Protestantism. They want _action_. They want meat, not jello salad. I had a pastor who gave us meat, 'The First Church of Christ, Activist', and she took a larger parish in California. That's the way modern liberal Protestantism can give us something worth doing. Her replacement's notions of diversity (which RevPat had prided herself on) was straight out of Prairie Home Companion and he wasn't very comfortable with the activist/social justice bit at ALL. The church has since folded and been merged with another of the same denomination. Led by a woman."

**Ah, Prairie Home Companion. I know what you mean above; still, there are things I value about Prairie Home Companion. Like this line: "The God that atheists don't believe in is the Lutheran God."

2. From Anne Newkirk Niven:

"Of the subject of magic in H. Potter: the magic in Harry Potter's universe involves learning spells that use specific magical properties of items in their natural world, and never once has been seen to call upon 'magical entities' for assistance in creating magic. Hence, it cannot be 'demonic' since it doesn't call upon demons. (Or for that matter, angels or gods.) In fact, Harry's universe appears to have no gods whatsoever; it is, in fact, a unique vision: a universe both magical and atheist.

In Potter's 'verse, nature simply has a much wider range of scope, and the witches and wizards in the story have genetic abilities to manipulate these laws of nature which muggles (non-magic-users) do not. The magical teachings of Hogwarts owe more to chemistry, physics, and biology ('potions', 'transfiguration' and 'care of magical creatures') than to theology, of which there is apparently none _at all_. Potter's world is completely and totally secular for both 'muggles' and magical beings, which is interesting since it is in all other ways a complete parallel to standard-brand notions of good and evil as the two major, opposing forces of the universe. Judeo-Christian ideas of virtue and vice dominate throughout, but they are completely desacralized."

3. In response to my question in the January/February issue about whether you wanted any changes in the newsletter, Diana Cook wrote me to say that she is happier with the newsletter when the ratio of commentary to items is ample on the side of commentary. I often worry that my comments will be excessive, and that you readers would prefer for me to devote less space to them; I'd be glad to hear from those of you who hold that view.

BOOK REVIEW

_The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country From the Religious Right_, by Michael Lerner; HarperSanFrancisco 2006. Hardcover; 408 pages; $24.95. ISBN-13: 978-0-06084247-5.

I've read this book now -- and much as I respect and admire Rabbi Michael Lerner, I am disappointed. Not just because the metaphor of the hands of God doesn't work for me; that's a separate issue, and I'll come back to it in a moment. My major complaint is that the book is far too long, far too wordy, and far too repetitious. Because what Lerner is saying is so important, I wish it had been said in a book that was more readable.

Lerner is correct, in my opinion, in saying that ordinary people in the U.S. are desperately hungry for something more in life than the prevailing cultural construct that says everyone is out to get you and the only rational way to live is to get them _before_ they get you -- plus the claim that the only measure of your value is how much money you're worth. I agree with him that the religious Right is perceived as a readily available and welcoming refuge by many people who are looking for a spiritual community to belong to; it seems to them to be offering precisely that. I agree with him that the non-Right is never going to be able to compete with the religious Right from an elitist mindset that treats the religious Right with contempt while offering people no alternative spiritual community of its own. He presents these positions in detail, with an abundance of solid argument and a careful historical review.

About that metaphor... On page 21 Lerner says: "The Right Hand of God is the hand of power and domination, the vision of God in which love is presented as consistent with celebrating the pain inflicted on those who are perceived as evil." On page 32 he describes the Left Hand of God as "the more loving and compassionate vision of God." A review by Jim Evans at http://www.ethicsdaily.com/ article_detail.cfm?AID=7144 says: "The God of the Religious Right is an angry, judging and violent God ready to wipe out sinners with his strong right hand. The left hand of God refers to a God of compassion and mercy, who bends toward the weak and the powerless with a message of love."

I have a very hard time with this image of a binary God with a militaristic strict-parent Right Hand that presides over vengeance and punishment, and a peaceful nurturant-parent Left Hand that presides over compassion and love. I kept hoping that as I read I'd find a section that would explain the image to me in a way that I could be comfortable with. That didn't happen. The closest thing to an explanation is in brief statements like this one on page 32, where Lerner says that there are times -- for example, when the Jews were enslaved by Egypt -- when "holding to a vision of the Right Hand of God was a psychologically and spiritually healthy position, given the historical realities of oppression that people were facing. Sometimes the most brutalized people need to believe that their oppressors will be overthrown, and a Right Hand of God consciousness gives them the only picture they can imagine of how that might happen... " I wish Lerner had written the book without this metaphor, catchy and evocative though it is as a book title and sound bite; every time it came up, I found it more disorienting. Nevertheless, this is an important book, and contains much wisdom.

Additional resources: a review and interview with Michael Lerner by Robert Anthony Siegel at http://www.bustedhalo.com/TheLeftHandofGod.htm?print ; a review by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat at http://www.spiritualityhealth.com/ newsh/items/bookreview/item_10256.html ; and a review by Ed Bacon, at http:// www.episcopalpeacefellowship.org/4-Resources/Articles/Lefthand-review.htm .

QUOTES & COMMENTS

1. The 3/06 issue of _Sojourner's_ (pp. 14-19) has an article by Brian McLaren, titled "Found in Translation," with this intro blurb: " 'Kingdom of God' is so last-century. Are there new ways to talk about Jesus' good news?"
McLaren argues on page 14 that "kingdom language" now makes us think of kings who play only symbolic or ceremonial roles, or evokes "patriarchy, chauvinism, imperialism, domination, and a regime without freedom... " And, he says, if Jesus were here today he'd choose some other metaphor.

McLaren has six suggestions for an alternative metaphor: The Dream Of God; The Revolution Of God; The Mission Of God; The Party Of God (by which he means not a political party but that "the kingdom of God is like a street party to which everybody is invited" (on page 18); The Network Of God; and The Dance Of God.

None of the six really holds me. If I had to choose, my preference among the six would be for the party, but the name would have to be tweaked ... maybe "The Street Party Of God," or "The Block Party Of God." Without that additional word, the "political party" interpretation would be overwhelming.

And of course, at just-short-of-seventy I'm not as uncomfortable with kingdom language as the younger generations are; I'm "last-century" my own self. My thanks to Patricia Mathews for the copy.

2. Thanks to Diana Cook for "The God Project: What the science of religion can't prove," by H. Allen Orr, on pp. 80-83 of the 4/3/06 _New Yorker_. This is an interesting and well-written article; I recommend it. I was particularly taken by this section on page 82, about Daniel Dennet (author of _Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon_):

"Dennett also argues that you can help a religion grow even if you don't believe in God. People can become conscious stewards of memes that they happen to consider benevolent, and, in the case of religion, the result might be a bloodless 'belief in belief.' People who aren't sure about God may nonetheless be sure that religion is good for society and so encourage its spread."

Orr ends the article by telling readers that it's certainly possible that religious beliefs are could be mistaken, but "it seems clear that any such conclusion must come from someplace other than science." The solution to problems related to religion, such as intolerance and fanaticism and terrorism, are unlikely, he says to "emerge from anyone's laboratory."

3. On page 69 of the 2/06 issue of _Locus_, short fiction reviewer Rich Horton writes:

"Joe Haldeman's 'Angel of Light' rather bleakly pictures a future America where a fusion of Islamic and Christian fundamentalisms has remade society in a medieval, nescient image, largely banning secular literature. A citizen of the Chrislamic state finds a copy of an SF magazine from the 1940s, and, while trading it in the marketplace, learns just how deeply the future has betrayed the bright expectations of the genre's infancy..." [The story was published in the 12/05 issue of the Australian science magazine _Cosmos_.]

(I had to go look up "nescient"; according to my dictionary, it means either "ignorant" or "agnostic." I am therefore still not sure what Rich Horton meant by it.)

4. The 3-4/06 issues of _Books & Culture_ (page 31) had a review titled "Double Helix," by Abram Van Engen; the books reviewed are David Maine's _The Preservationist_ and _Fallen_, from St. Martin's Press. Van Engen is interested in the problem of how writers re-tell narratives from the Bible "while attempting to remain faithful to Scripture." He says that unlike God in Paradise Lost, who appears "anthropomorphically" but speaks a special language of his own, Maine has God appear in the form of natural objects like trees and rocks, but has him speaking "an ordinary tongue." It worked well, Maine says, in _The Preservationist_, but:

"In _Fallen_... humor and ease disappear, and suddenly God's colloquial speech seems ridiculous, even petty. Expelling Adam and Eve from the Garden, God sounds like a petulant boss: '_You have until dusk_," he squawks. 'To do what?' asks Eve. '_To leave_.' Oh."

And Van Engen notes: "Reinvigorating ossified biblical tales is not easy, particularly when grumpy reviewers parse the narrative for its theology."

I don't know about that word "ossified," or the presupposition in "reinvigorating." When I adapted the Bible stories for the American Bible Society's literacy primers, I was so grateful that the stories were for the most part such rip-roaring and vigorous _good_ stories, and that they were so often suitable for both kids and adults. (I've always thought that the story where Peter tries to get out of the boat and walk on the water to Jesus -- and chickens out almost immediately -- is one of the best stories ever, and they let me include that one in the set.) However, although the things God says in a 28-page or 12-page primer are necessarily very short, the problem of remaining "faithful to Scripture" remains. I sincerely hope that the words I used in the stories didn't make God seem "ridiculous, even petty."

[_Books & Culture_ is $24.95 a year for 6 issues; subs go to PO Box 37060, Boone, IA 50037-0060 or 1-800-523-7964.]

5. "Mescalero Family Sues 'Into the West'," by Tim Korte (_Albuquerque Journal_ for 3/18/06), is about a lawsuit filed by the parents of an 8-year-old girl who was an extra in Spielberg's tv miniseries, and whose hair was cut by a stylist on the set because "the movie casting call failed to produce sufficient young male extras of Indian heritage." Korte writes:

"The Mescalero tradition forbids cutting a girl's hair as she approaches puberty. To prepare for womanhood, Mescalero girls participate in a sacred Coming of Age ceremony that requires their hair to reach the waist. Before it was cut, [Danny] Ponce said, his daughter's hair fell midway down her back. It has since grown to her collar."

This is a sad tale. The parents are asking for $250,000 for emotional distress and $75,000 in damages, but no amount of money is going to make this right. Hair will grow only as fast as it grows, money or no money.

6. From an article on various controversies growing out of beliefs about hell (or Hell, if you prefer), on page 11 of the 11-12/03 issue of _Sojourner's_ -- titled "Damnation Will Not Be Televised," and written by Rose Marie Berger:

"All this sparked a heated debate in the ivory towers of theology, where battle lines were drawn between traditionalists who believe the unsaved burn forever, conditinalists who say the unsaved burn for a little while, annihilationists who think unbelievers disappear after death thereby avoiding torment, and universalists who posit that a loving God will ultimately save all. (Tim Lahaye's apocalyptic fantasy series _Left Behind_ is making millions off the fray.)

7. Thanks to Patricia Mathews for sending "Torture in the name of... ," by Gerald L. Zelizer, in the 2/20/06 issue of _USA Today_. Zelizer begins ecumenically, discussing the issue of torture as it has been dealt with in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism. But then he unfortunately muddies the waters with a confusing quotation that -- despite being an extraordinarily _important_ question -- is clearly limited to Christianity and Judaism.

"So why haven't religions -- professing the worth of each person as created in God's image -- opposed torture as a practice clearly outside the bounds of a good faith? Why have they had to overcome their 'dark side' to arrive at the obvious moral answer? Because, in the words of Rabbi David Hartman..., 'The Bible doesn't teach you tolerance. ... You go there for passion, for zealousness, for extremes. Biblical people are extremists.' "

Zelizer also reports that, according to recent polls, "nearly two-thirds of the American public believes that torturing suspected terrorists to gain important information is justified in some circumstances" and "more than half would agree to send them to a foreign country where U.S. restrictions do not apply." Americans, he says, "apparently find torture to be a necessary evil."

8. I have a sizable stack of materials that discuss the "Instruction Concerning the Criteria of Vocational Discernment Regarding Persons with Homosexual Tendencies" issued from the Vatican on 11/29/05. I keep reading and re-reading them, looking for items that are neither ambiguous nor hostile; much of the material is so bitter and so polemic that anything quoted out of context is impossible to interpret fairly. I have decided, therefore, to quote from a discussion of two "technical terms" in the controversy: "affective maturity" and "spiritual fatherhood."

From "The Vatican Instruction: Reactions," by Fr. Robert Johansen, pp. 30-32 of the 1/06 _The Catholic World Report_, sent by Douglas Dee:

a. "Some signs of affective maturity in a candidate [_for the priesthood_] would be 'prudence, an ability to appropriately express emotions, the practice of self-discipline, and the ability to set appropriate boundaries' in one's behavior and relationships." [This is from Bishop Earl Boyea, who also defines "affective maturity" with the circular statement that it is "all of the virtues and dispositions needed to be a good priest."

b. "Affective maturity in the correct ordering of his sexual impulses is essential to the candidate for Holy Orders so that, as the Instruction states, he can develop 'a true sense of spiritual fatherhood toward the ecclesial community entrusted to him.' Spiritual fatherhood is intrinsically connected to the masculine identity and its ordering toward the opposite sex." [From the same source, on page 31.]
And one supplementary quotation from an editorial in the same issue by Demenico Bettinelli, Jr., titled 'Objections to the Instruction," on page 1, where we find this statement -- clarified dramatically by a metaphor -- about the policy:

c. "It is intended to foster a healthy priesthood that effectively relates to the Church according to the Scriptural and theological imagery of Christ and His Bride."

9. The 3/6/06 issue of _Time_, pp. 46-48, has an interesting article titled "There's No Pulpit Like Home" about the current movement "known in evangelical circles as 'house churching,' 'home churching,' or 'simple church' -- small groups that are holding their own church services in a member's home. Authors David Van Biema and Rita Healy, on page 47, describe one such church this way: "There is no pastor, choir or sermon -- just six believers and Jesus among them, closer than their breath. Or so thinks Jeanine, who two years ago abandoned a large congregation..." They note that since the 1990s "the ascendant mode of conservative American faith has been the megachurch," which may have tens of thousands of members; the "home churching" movement is a very different way of worshipping. A sidebar on page 48 describes an analogous home churching [home templing?] movement in Judaism.

[The "closer than their breath" wording is taken from the opening lines of a song by the musical group Sixpence None the Richer.]

Predictably, there are critics, who "fret that small, pastorless groups can become doctrinally or even socially unmoored." (page 48) Southern Baptist Thom Rainer says, on the same page: "I have no problem with where a church meets, [but] I do think that there are some house churches that, in their desire to move in different directions, have perhaps moved from biblical accountability."

10. "... [W]hereas the Greeks understood words as names for things, the Hebraic understanding included a sense of words _as_ things, things having effect.... This sense of the power of words is demonstrated in God's having spoken the world into being, and continues through the recurrent re-naming of places and persons we find throughout both the Hebrew Bible and even -- as in the case of Saint Paul -- the New Testament. Words have, therefore, agency. They don't simply name what was -- though they certainly do that -- but they generate new thoughts, bring about new identities."

This is Scott Cairns, on page 58 of an interview by Gregory Dunne that appears on pp. 53-65 of the Winter 2004-2005 issue of _Image_. You can read some materials by Cairns -- including poetry and an essay -- at http://www. imagejournal.org/aom/cairns_scott.asp . Recommended.

11. The 12/05 issue of _Atlantic_ (pp. 105-112) had an excellent article by Paul Bloom titled "Is God An Accident?"; I recommend it. In a section about neuroscientist Sam Harris's book _The End of Faith_, on page 112, Bloom writes:

"But while it may be true that 'theologically correct' Buddhism explicitly rejects the notions of body-soul duality and immaterial entities with special powers, actual Buddhists believe in such things. (Harris himself recognizes this: at one point he complains about the millions of Buddhists who treat the Buddha as a Christ figure.) ... Or consider the notion that the soul escapes the body at death. ... There is little hint of such an idea in the Old Testament, although it enters into Judaism later on. The New Testament is notoriously unclear about the afterlife... In 1999 the Pope himself cautioned people to think of heaven not as an actual place but, rather, as a form of existence -- that of being in relation to God. Despite all this, most Jews and Christians... believe in an afterlife -- in fact, even people who claim to have no religion at all tend to believe in one."

CYBERSPACE

1. _Religion BookLine_ for 1/25/06 had a brief review note for Richard Smoley's _Forbidden Faith: The Gnostic Legacy from the Gospels to The Da Vinci Code_ (Harper San Francisco):

"This clear, concise (albeit cursory in spots) primer traces the Gnostic threads of philosophy, religion, science and popular culture from their biblical references through to their 21st-century appearances in novels and film. Moving easily from one century to the next while at the same time connecting them to each other, Smoley is at once thoughtful and thought-provoking. ... Throughout, Smoley reinforces that Gnosticism is, and always has been, here to stay. He paves a wide, clear path to understanding it, accessible even by the weekend seeker."

2. I realize -- thanks to Patricia Mathews -- that I've given no thought, and no attention, to the religious language found in comic strips and comic books. She sent me the URL for the "Religious Affiliations of Comic Book Characters" website, which offers an amazing amount of information, and some links to more of the same, at http://www.adherents.com/lit/comics/comic_book_religion.html . Recommended.

3. I genuinely don't know what to make of this next item. It's an online book notice for _The Origin of Speeches: Intelligent Design in Language; From the Language of Eden to Our Babble After Babel_, by Isaac E. Mozeson, published by Lightcatcher Books. The ad -- which has a link to a downloadable PDF version -- is at http://www.lightcatcherbooks.com/products_books_originofspeeches.html . Sample:

"Now comes an epical book that documents the language of the earliest modern humans. Let's call them Adam and Eve, and let's call that global Mother Tongue 'Edenic.' Surely our current 6,000 languages grew from migrations and such, but this book proves that there was a 'Big Bang' that diversified that special original, global language."

See also the "Garden of Edenics" website, at http://www.gardenofedenics.com/ edenics.htm .

4. "Worrying is praying for what you don't want."

[That's wonderful. It's from Chris West, quoted in an interview with David James Duncan at http://www.powells.com/ink/duncan.html .]

5. "In the last election, evangelicals made up 26 percent of the electorate, and 78 percent of them voted for Bush. ... To win the 2004 presidential election, John Kerry needed just 59,300 additional votes in Ohio -- that's four percent of the total evangelical vote in the state, or approximately 10 percent of Ohio's moderate evangelical voters. And if the Democratic Party changed its reputation on religion, the result could alter the electoral map in a more significant and permanent way. That's why, insiders say, the word has gone forth from the Republican National Committee to defeat Democratic efforts to reclaim religion."

This is Amy Sullivan, in "When Would Jesus Bolt?", in the 4/06 _Washington Monthly_, online at http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/ 0604.sullivan.html . [Note: The focus of this article is on events such as a Republican filibuster in the Alabama legislature against "legislation that would offer an elective course on the Bible in public high schools" and on various indications that substantial numbers of evangelicals are moving toward more moderate positions on a number of issues.]

6. I'm sure that by now you will have read (or heard about) the $2.4 million prayer research study led by Herbert Benson which is said to have proved not only that prayer is useless as part of health care, but that subjects in the study who were told that they would be prayed for did worse than those who were only told that they _might_ be. The problems associated with all atempts to do prayer research in a medical context have been discussed a number of times in this newsletter previously, and I won't rehash those discussions here.

I do want to address just one sentence, however, from "Faith-Based Medicine," by Raymond J. Lawrence, in the 4/11/06 _NY Times_, online at http://www. nytimes.com/2006/04/11/opinion/11lawrence.html?th&emc-th .The sentence goes like this:

"The Lord's Prayer, the central prayer of Christendom, contains no plea for God to influence specific events in people's lives."

Well.... "Give us this day our daily bread" is a specific request for God to influence a specific event in people's lives, and the multitudes of hungry people in this world would back me up on that. My thanks to Rebecca Haden for sending me the story.

And then there's the story by Oliver Burkeman that has as its headline "If you want to get better -- don't say a little prayer," despite the fact that the story is about people praying for other people rather than for themselves, and despite the fact that the last sentence in the story is "Praying for oneself has been shown in many studies to be effective." [I'm not making this up; it's at http://www.guardian.co.uk/ print/0,,329448063-110878,00.html . Thanks to Wib Smith for sending this my way.]

7. You can find all ten of "The Paradoxical Commandments," written by Kent M. Keith when he was only nineteen years old, at http://www. pilgrimsmindbodyspirit.co.uk/mindbodyspiritmagazine/kentkeith.htm . The basic pattern -- not followed slavishly -- is "If you do [some good thing] the response will be [some bad thing]. Do the good thing anyway." For example, the tenth one goes like this: "Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you have anyway."

[Sales of Keith's book _Anyway: The Paradoxical Commandments_ won't be helped by the fact that the review link on this webpage doesn't take you to a review of that book. Somebody needs to be paying more attention. I found a review at http://www.thecelebritycafe.com/books/full_review/71.html .]

8. I don't plan to comment on the controversy about the _Gospel of Judas_ until I've had a chance to read it, and to do some research. In the meantime, the Internet Scout Report for 4/14/06 has this description of the National Geographic's website for it at http://www9.nationalgeographic.com/lostgospel/ :

"...[T]his fine website... allows users to explore the document at their leisure and to learn more about the potential importance of such a find. First-time visitors to the site will want to stop by the About the Project area. Here they can learn about the persons working on this project, review a list of FAQs, and learn more about Coptic, which is the language in which the Gospel of Judas was written. Proceeding from there, visitors can explore the document online and they can also download the entire work, translated into English, or in the original Coptic. ... The site is rounded out by an area that contains information about the complex and painstakingly detailed process by which the document was brought back to life and subsequently conserved for future generations."
9. If you haven't yet read "Soldiers of Christ," by Jeff Sharlet (pp. 41-54 in the 5/05 issue of _Harper's_) I urge you to do so; it's one of the most interesting articles on religious phenomena and language I've ever read. It's online now at http://www.harpers.org/SoldiersOfChrist.html . Here's a sample (mentioning New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado) from page 44 of the print edition:

"...[T]he sanctuary is built like two great satellite dishes clapped belly to belly. It was designed, I was told, to 'beam' prayer across the land. (New Lifers always turn to metaphors to describe their church and their city, between which they make little distinction. It is like a 'training camp' in that its young men and women go forth on 'missions.' It is like a 'bomb' in that it 'explodes,' 'gifting' the rest of us with its fallout; revival, which is to say, 'values,' which is to say, 'the Word,' which is to say, as so many there do, 'a better way of life.' ")

According to Sharlet, New Life's pastor Ted Haggard (called "Pastor Ted") "talks to President George W. Bush or his advisers every Monday"; furthermore, "No pastor in America holds more sway over the political direction of evangelism than does Pastor Ted, and no church more than New Life," although New Life is by no means the largest of the megachurches.

10. A comment at my blog [http://www.livejournal.com/users/ozarque] sent me to an excellent resource I hadn't known existed -- the list of links (briefly annotated) for the PBS News Hour's "Religion Background Reports." The URL is http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/religion/religion.html ; the link for 4/7/06 reads:

"_New Opinions on Judas_. A newly authenticated and newsly translated ancient document known as the 'Gospel of Judas' tells the story of Judas, not as Jesus' betrayer, but as his favored disciple."

11. Cyberplaces to visit: Andrew Sullivan's defense of his terms "Christianist" and "Christianism," at http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/2006/04/christianism_a_html , suggested by Allen Hurst; "Christian and a Philip Pullman Fan?: No Contradiction, One Author Says," at http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6324179.html ; "A Time for Heresy," by Bill Moyers (which contains the only example I've ever seen of the phrase "primal Baptists" at http://www.tompaine.com/ print/a_time_for_heresy.php ; a nondenominational "Theological Statement" out of Nashville, at http://www.tyingnashvilletogether.org/theological_statement , sent by Wib Smith; "Iran president paves the way for arabs' imam return," at http://www.iranian.ws/iran_news/publish/printer_10945.shtml ; an excellent article on speaking in tongues titled "The Pentecostal Promise," at http://www.nytimes.com/ 2006/04/23/magazine/23wwin_essay.html?_r=1&oref=slogin , sent by Douglas Dee ; a list of annotated links to Native American Religion Web sites, at http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/nrms/naspirit.html .
ONE STEP FORWARD, SIX STEPS POLYSYLLABICALLY BACK

Going to http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/projects/strategic/ modeling_behaviors.pdf/view will take you to a PDF of "Modeling Behaviors, Articulating Beliefs: Reporting on Lessons Learned and Questions Remaining from our Online Conference for Spiritual Progressives." I wasn't happy with that online conference -- although I was awed by how splendidly it worked technically -- and I'm not happy with the report. Nevertheless, for those who are deeply interested in finding a way for the non-Right to communicate with the religious Right, I believe it's something that should be read.

The "Executive Summary" identifies three problems: that "conservative interpretation of religious scripture" has major effects on the government and institutional policy decisions that all of us have to live with; that this creates a perception of a link "between religiosity and politics" that is divisive, alienating religious people of the non-Right from politics and politicians of the non-Right from religion; and that the result is that "progressive activists have neglected to harness the influence faith-based discourse could have on advocating for their policy preferences."

One more quote, from page 7 (italics in the original):

"The progressive axiom (and rationale for the Golden Rule), that _human dignity does not come from wealth, and that is a progressive value_, has become a somewhat radical position to take at this point in American society. A logical conclusion from this axiom is that the acquisition of wealth is bad for you spiritually -- that it is more moral to live with less, to actively avoid the pursuit of material things, to rejoice in the simple. This ethos can be daunting to the practitioner, especially in our consumption-obsessed country."

MERCY. It truly is not necessary to word a sentence the way that last sentence has been worded. It's not only unnecessary to claim that your axiom is "the rationale for the Golden Rule," it's arrogant. And it's neither useful nor helpful to set up thicket after thicket of impenetrable Academic Regalian (Standard ProfessorSpeak) in your documents when you are an organization claiming to have as its primary goal finding ways to communicate with the widest possible audience. This report has lovely wide margins.

Copyright © 2006 Suzette Haden Elgin
All rights reserved

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