November/December 2001 newsletter

THE RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE NEWSLETTER
Volume 2, Issue 6 -- November/December 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 for each calendar year) 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; Editorial; Network Input; Prayer Update; Cyberstuff; Note on the Problem of Arabic Religious Language; Quotes & Comments; Request For Your Advice; A Lovingkindness Morning Prayer

EDITOR'S NOTE:

My thanks to all of you for your letters and messages, and for all the useful materials that you have been sending; my thanks to those who have been sending in their renewals for the coming year. I'm grateful for the many gift memberships and Supporting Memberships; I'll do my best to give you good value for them. If you haven't yet sent me your renewal instructions, please don't forget -- I won't be cluttering your inbox with any more reminders. If you are a new member for 2002, this issue comes to you as a welcoming gift.

Because of the sad possiblity that serious Internet disruption will occur over the Halloween holiday, I'm sending this issue a bit early. I send you my warmest good wishes for the coming holiday season, which will be bittersweet this year; may the New Year treat you, and all of humankind, gently.

EDITORIAL

Many people have been sending me materials about pacifism, and saying that they wonder what I have to say now _as_ a pacifist. Most of the forwarded materials can be summarized as follows: "I've always said that pacifists are idiots, and the terrorist attacks of September 11th prove me right. I now expect all pacifists to apologize for having been so wrong for so long; I expect them to come out wholeheartedly in favor of the violence that we are now fully entitled to inflict." Some of the items say all that by ranting and raving; some offer carefully-reasoned and respectfully-worded arguments, for which courtesy and good taste I am grateful. Most of the items claim that anyone who is a pacifist is on the side of the terrorists; most of them claim that to be nonviolent is to be a coward who does nothing at all and constitutes a disgrace to humankind. I'm not going to rant and rave here, nor am I going to lay out a detailed argument; I have only a few brief words to say.

(1) For Christian pacifists like myself, the only thing that George Bush -- in his chosen role as First Christian -- could appropriately have said after September 11th is this: "Our faith obligates us to return good for evil, and that is what we are going to do." What is being said and done instead breaks our hearts. (2) Those who claim that we Christian pacifists are stupid (or, more courteously, "naive") have a right to their opinion. Almost everyone I know agrees with them. I can live with being considered stupid and/or naive. (3) Those who claim that we are cowards are simply ignorant of history, and they can repair that ignorance easily enough; they don't need my help to do that. (4) Those who claim that we're on the side of the terrorists are a different matter: They don't read, and they don't listen. When we say that we're commanded to return good for evil, we are identifying the terrorists' acts as evil, just exactly like everyone else -- including George Bush -- does. That doesn't put us on the side of the terrorists, it just puts us on the side of responding to the terrorists differently. So far, in every war that I remember (which includes World War II), those who believe that "a just war" is the proper response to violence have overruled us, and here we are today -- in yet another war. I am not _about_ to recant.

NETWORK INPUT

1. Ken Rolph sent me his review of Warren W. Wiersbe's _Index of Biblical Images_ (Baker Books 2000), which is an alphabetical index of over 400 biblical metaphors and symbols, with Scripture references for each one, based on the New International Version. The preface explains that the purpose of the book is to let you look up a particular metaphor -- "light," for example -- and find out how it's presented in different contexts. Example from Ken: "TENT: human body, David's dynasty, death, God's judgment, God's protection, the heavens, pilgrim life, prosperity/security, and Christ (like a tent peg). That last reference is Zechariah 10:4 and was certainly unexpected as far as I was concerned." [I wasn't aware of a "Christ the Tent Peg" metaphor either, and the verse itself isn't explicit, so I checked. I went to Rabbi Joseph Telushkin's indispensable book, _Biblical Literacy_ (William Morrow 1997), page 309, where Telushkin writes that Zechariah "prophesies that the Messiah will banish the 'warrior's bow' (bring about universal peace), and be acknowledged as a world leader.] Ken calls this a "charming little book" and vouches for its usefulness.

2. Remember the discussion in earlier issues about what vegetable might be acceptable to Christians to play the role of Christ in the Veggie Tales (Bible-story videos for kids)? I was baffled; and then I thanked you for reminding me that "sacred Corn beings are prominently featured in various Native American/First Nations cultures." Well.... Fran Stallings, storyteller and scientist, writes to say this: "Botanists must point out that corn is actually a fruit (as are tomatoes, peppers, squashes etc -- hey, anything with a seed in it). The USDA, however, blithely categorizes anything we eat with salt as a vegetable, and I wonder if Americans may feel veggies are less spiritual than fruits." Thank you, Fran. Now where are we? I have a terrible time perceiving corn (and squash and peppers) as fruit; perhaps they fall into a category we should call "folk-vegetables."

PRAYER UPDATE

1. My thanks to Nancy Frishberg, Hal Davis, Clarke Stone, and Pat Mathews for sending information about the recent research study investigating the effects of prayer in reproductive medicine. The double-blind study, done with 199 women aged 26 to 46, ran from 12/98 to 3/99; neither these women, nor their physicians, nor the medical personnel involved in their care, knew that a study of prayer was being conducted. According to Emma Young, writing for _New Scientist_ online on 10/5/01: "Despite controls for age, length of infertility, type of infertility and number of prior attempts to become pregnant following IVF [_in vitro fertilization_], 50 percent of women who were prayed for became pregnant, compared with 26 per cent of women in the control group." According to the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons (press release adapted by _ScienceDaily_ for 10/2/01): "The people praying for the women... were incapable of knowing or contacting the women undergoing the procedures. Which women were in which group was not revealed until the pregnancy data became available at the completion of the study. The people praying... were separated into three groups. One group received pictures of the women and prayed for an increase in their pregnancy rate. Another group prayed to improve the effectiveness of the first group. A third group prayed for the two other groups." Lead researcher and author Rogerio Lobo states that the researchers went into the study with the expectation that there would be _no_ effects from the prayers; they were astonished by the results, and published their research only in the hope of finding out if the results are "reproducible." Dr. Lobo says that they "would like to understand the biological or other phenomena that led to this almost doubling of the pregnancy rate."

[You can read these stories in full at http://www.newscientist. com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991386 and http://www.sciencedaily.com/ releases/2001/10/011002065831.htm; the original press release is at http://cpmcnet.columbia.edu/dept/ps for 10/1/01. The original study appeared in _The Journal of Reproductive Medicine_ for 10/05/01; the lead author and researcher was Rogerio Lobo.]

The results of this study -- like similar results from prayer research done with enzymes and seedlings -- are exceedingly inconvenient for both science and medicine. The most serious scientific problem is the "nonlocal intervention" problem; that is, the idea that something can be done to affect living organisms without any identifiable link (or other recognized effective mechanism) between the person who prays and the organism being prayed for. The most immediately urgent _medical_ problem is that if the treatment were a drug or a surgical procedure (or any other sort of conventional therapy) with a success rate of the kind demonstrated in the study above, it would be considered criminal malpractice for doctors not to use it. According to the _London Telegraph_, the researchers almost refrained from publishing their findings "because they were so improbable"; it's difficult to imagine that reaction if the research had been done with any other intervening factor.

The results are equally inconvenient for humankind as a whole. If prayer can be scientifically proved to have real world effects of this kind, the obligation to pray ceases to be a subjective matter; the decision to pray or not to pray has concrete consequences that must be taken very seriously. Prayer becomes useful _work_, and work is something our culture values.

Remember Pascal's advice? Suppose you conduct your life as if you believe in God: If there is no God, you'll be no worse off than if you had behaved as an atheist; but if there _is_ a God, you'll be a lot better off. People might want to consider following in his footsteps. Suppose they make the decision to pray; if prayer doesn't work, they're no worse off than if they hadn't prayed -- but if it _does_ work, they're a lot better off. It seems to me, as I've said before, that the daily offering up of "May everything that happens this day and this night be for the best" might be a wise move.

2. "From the very beginning, God has shared power with us, giving us power to name, to create, to choose, to act. We have done wonderful things with that privilege. We have also abused it. The dark side of our power is our power to resist God... We tend to dilute that fact by believing our rebellions are more or less benign, like two-year-olds pounding their parents' knees. God allows us the temporary illusion of power, we tell ourselves, but God is really in charge, and when things get bad enough God will come back into the room and set everything right. Only what if that is not how things work? What if God has settled for limited power in order to be in partnership with us and we really can mess things up? What if God lets us?"

This is Barbara Brown Taylor, writing on page 116 of her book _God In Pain: Teaching Sermons on Suffering_, published by Abingdon Press in 1998. For those of us who believe that God _does_ let us make dreadful messes, and who prayed with all our hearts that the U.S. would not respond to the September 11th violence with more violence, the fact that our prayers failed is bitter.

3. Patricia Clason wrote: "What is powerful for me about the prayer of Jabez is its simplicity and the commitment it supports. It says I am willing to receive whatever God has in store for me (Bless me O Lord indeed!) and I am willing to be a bigger presence in the world (enlarge my territory) that is working on God's behalf and that I wish for God's light/wisdom/love to be with me at all times in all that I do (walk by my side) and that I choose not to be a part of evil and wish to be protected from evil as well. Says it all - Thy Will Be Done. I too wondered about the differing translations, and determined that both desires are valid and important -- to not cause pain... and to be safe from evil. Seems to me that the KJV translation is probably the most accurate -- Jabez appeared to be humble enough to say "Please let me be your servant and let me not be a cause for anyone's pain."

The Jabez Prayer phenomenon continues to dominate religious publishing, on and off the Net, with even greater popularity since the September 11th events. I was glad to get the letter above because it showed me a way of understanding that prayer that wouldn't have occurred to me on my own -- including the idea of incorporating both translations of the last line instead of feeling obliged to choose between them.

There is a position regarding religious language -- especially prayers and "sacred texts" of all kinds -- which says that making even the smallest change in the language damages it and may even rob it of its sacredness; there is another position which says that what truly matters about such language is making it directly and personally relevant to the individual, even if the result is language that can't be distinguished from the language of casual conversation. (And of course there are many positions in between these two extremes.) For me, changing "Fear not!" to "Don't be scared!" removes the magic. But I'm sixty-five; it may be generational mindmyopia.

CYBERSTUFF

1. I found an excellent resource site on the Internet the other day called the Internet Christian Library; the amount of information stored there is amazing. For example, there is a huge alphabetical directory of websites that can be fit under the "Christian" rubric, each on a link, with detailed annotations. Nothing from the extreme left, as might be expected, but a wide variety. Recommended. The URL is http://www.iclnet.org.

2. There's a fine site for information on Theravada Buddhism at http://www.accesstoinsight.org/index.html. I recommend clicking on the link to "Glossary of Pali and Buddhist Terms" (which for some reason is listed under the "Help" category instead of independently); very interesting annotated definitions, with links to additional information on many of the terms. Also useful, the "Therevada Text Archives" link.

2. "Facilitation In a Cross-Cultural Environment" is a document from the Union of International Associations, based on the work of Geert Hofstede; it is "specifically designed to respond to differences in religious belief systems as is the case in inter-faith dialogue." The organizing scheme for the document uses four "dimensions," as follows: "(a) power distance," defined as "the attitude to human inequality and relationships to superiors and inferiors in any hierachy"; "(b) uncertainty avoidance," defined as "the tolerance for uncertainty which determines choices and rituals to cope with it in social structures and belief systems"; "(c) polarization," defined as "the extent to which differences such as masculinity or femininity have implications for social organization and the organization of beliefs"; and "(d), individualism," defined as "the relationshp between the individual and the collectivity, especially in the way individuals choose to live and work together." Recommended; you'll find it at http://www.uia.org/uiadocs/ conftran/xfacil.htm.

3. When I came across "The Post-Rapture Survival Guide" in early September, I printed it out for the Lovingkindness files, but I didn't plan to mention it here. However, since September 11th it has become important for everyone to be aware of the worldview of the many thousands of people who are now convinced that we are in the End Times; in that context you would find this informative, and perhaps surprising. (I was surprised by the statement in Section 5 that "The problem for the world's leaders will be to convince people that it [the Rapture] didn't happen"; that idea would never have occurred to me.) The URL is http://www.millennia.co.za/worldwatch/survive.htm.

4. From the Beliefnet Newsletter for 9/19/01: "Beliefnet is...going to produce a book, with Rodale Press, tentatively called 'From the Ashes: A Spiritual Response to the Attack on America,' which will offer spiritual wisdom from many faith traditions and ordinary individuals. If there's anything that you think ought to be in this book....please post it here: http://www.beliefnet.com/tlrd.asp?lnkpid= 206&Inkid=152. The profits from this book will go to charity and relief efforts."

5. You might wander by the The Visionary Fiction website, at http://www.visionaryfiction.com, which divides the genre into the following categories -- classic forerunners, historical novels, inspirationals, Judaica, literary novels, magical realism, mythic tales, mysteries, New Age adventures, New Age thrillers, novels of prehistory, quest novels, romance novels, and "sci-fi fantasies." I don't know about all this -- I'm not sure what the principles behind the list of categories would be, and I haven't explored the site thoroughly enough to find out. I know that I understand visionary fiction to be fiction written primarily to present a religious message, often with the inclusion of religious language in substantial quantity.

6. Long ago, Hal Davis sent me a 7/17/89 _NY Times_ story by Alan Cowell titled "Malula Journal: A Place Where the Language of Jesus Is at Home." Cowell wrote about Malula, a town in Syria where the Aramaic language was still in use but in danger of dying out. Eleven years is a long time, more than long enough for an endangered language to disappear; I went to Google and did a search to update my information. The Malula homepage is still on the Net, but now seems to be aimed primarily at tourists; its "The Language" link offers only two sentences. But I found a long _NY Times_ article from 9/4/99: "Malula Journal: In Isolated Pocket of Syria, the Language Spoken by Jesus Survives," written by Douglas Jehl. Here's a sample:

"Here in the barren Qalamun Mountains, the people do not speak Arabic, at least among themselves. That language has been the lingua franca in this part of the world for more than 1,000 years, but theirs is even older, going back nearly 3,000 years to around 900 B.C. The language is Aramaic, the one spoken by Jesus Christ. Everywhere else, it died out centuries ago, but here, somehow, it has endured, insulated by isolation and nurtured by pride. Only in Malula, with a population of about 5,000, and in two nearby villages does Aramaic survive. 'Even in Damascus, people look at us funny, and they ask what language are you speaking,' said Assad Barkeel, 24. Like nearly everyone else here, Barkeel learned Aramaic from the cradle, and also like nearly everyone else, he says he is determined to pass on the gift to another generation."

Recommended. You'll find the complete article at http://www.library.cornell. edu/colldev/mideast/malul.htm.

NOTE ON THE PROBLEM OF ARABIC RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE

The Koran, about which we've heard so much lately, is written in Arabic, but it's not contemporary Arabic. And unlike the situation with regard to the English in the Bible, "updating" the language of the Koran is considered to be tampering with holy language; the very idea inspires horror. There is no "Contemporary Arabic Version" of the Koran, nor is there likely to be any such thing in the foreseeable future. The real world results of this fact are not trivial. I don't often quote from my own books in my newsletters; forgive me if you've seen this quotation before. I think it might be useful in the current circumstances.

"...(W)hat if written English had been frozen in the forms that were used in the King James Bible, while the spoken language had moved on, and the gulf between the two varieties of English had restricted literacy to an elite upper class? Suppose politicians in the United States could take something like 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live' from the King James Bible and turn it into a rap slogan aimed at illiterate thousands in American inner cities and rural small towns, with complete confidence that its targets wouldn't be able to find that section of the Bible and read the sequence in context, or read commentaries and discussions of the section. Suppose that at the same time the elite classes in the United States would know so little about rap that they'd pay no attention to the slogan and its effects. Suppose politicians could take the loaded word 'abomination,' which figures so prominently in the Old Testatment, reshape it in a dialect unfamiliar to upper-class Americans, and begin using it as a buzzword to whip up hatred against whatever they disapproved of. This is precisely the sort of problem that Arabic-speaking people struggle with in the real world today."

[From page 160 of _The Language Imperative_, by Suzette Haden Elgin; Perseus Books 2000. (While I'm here....the book has been lambasted in an outraged-reader review at amazon.com on the grounds that it's "opinionated." I certainly hope it is; I intended it to be.)]

QUOTES & COMMENTS

1. From a multitude of sources: When George Bush called the new war a crusade, that was an "unfortunate" choice of words.

Anyone who needs proof that we should all be concerned about the effects of religious language now has that proof. We need only look at the effect of George Bush's use of the word "crusade" as his first metaphor for the war against terrorism, which became a weapon in the mouths of the terrorists as they spoke to the Muslims of the world, and in the mouths of Christians who are fiercely opposed to the existence of any religion other than Christianity.

There are two possible explanations for this phenomenon, both appalling; choose the one that seems to you most accurate. (1) Bush was entirely ignorant of the semantic implications of "crusade" and would never have used the word if he'd known about those semantic implications. (2) Bush knew perfectly well what the semantic implications of "crusade" are and chose the word because those implications constituted the message he wished to send.

[Hal Davis sent me a copy of an October 10th article titled "Tongue-Tied: How Language Became a Struggle and May Change in Wake of Attacks," by Amanda Onion, in which it's suggested that people have suddenly been brought to an abrupt awareness that language should not be carelessly used; it mentions the "crusade" blunder. The URL is http://abcnews.go.com/sections/ scitech/DailyNews/strike_language011011.html.]

2. From _Locus_ for 4/01, on page 68: "UC Riverside is paying full fellowships...and providing jobs to German students Sabing Thuerwaechter...and Bernhard Janzen...to write a three-volume doctoral thesis on the religious content and structure of _Star Trek_, for their doctorates in comparative literature. Thuerwaechter is an archaeologist and expert on Middle Eastern cultures and ancient cuneiform writing; Janzen is a Roman Catholic friar with a Ph.D. in theology."

3. From _Publishers Weekly_ for 7/31/00, "Books Both Broad and Deep," by Lynn Garrett, on page 33: "The hiring of personal service providers like trainers, career coaches and dietitians has become common, and 'spirituality coaching' also seems to be growing in popularity. Spiritual directors, while usually not therapists or counselors, are nonetheless professionals who guide individuals in their spiritual development." Although I've often wished I had a spiritual advisor or director, I cannot imagine hiring a personal "spiritual coach" or "spiritual trainer." Tin Ear Mode, it seems to me, especially "spiritual coach."

4. "The devout cannot have it both ways. Pro-church arguments have made headway on the left by purporting to defend the democratic rights of the religious, but this is not really a debate about rights. Rather, what pro-church militants are demanding is exemption from challenge to, or even criticism of, their claim to a privileged role in shaping social values. With no sense of contradiction, they presume the right, even obligation, to attack secularists' worldview while feeling entitled to unquestioned 'respect,' which is to say suffocating reverence, for their own beliefs. In a democracy, however, organized religion has no more right to be shielded from opposition than the state, the corporation, the labor union, the university, the media or any other institutions. Pro-churchers will object that religion is different...."

This comes from "Freedom From Religion: What's at Stake in Faith-Based Politics," by Ellen Willis, _The Nation_ for 2/19/01, on page 16; my thanks to Pat Mathews for sending the copy. I suppose I'm obligated to point out that the U.S. is a democratic republic rather than a democracy per se, but once we get past that Willis is correct. The standard position is "You can't criticize the things I say about morality and similar topics, because the things I say are in religious language and are therefore automatically entitled to be exempt from criticism." For a defense of that position, see "Why We Can't All Just Get Along," by Stanley Fish, pp. 18-26 in the 2/96 issue of _First Things_.

Here are two brief samples from page 22 of Fish, to give you the mouth-puckering flavor. First, in reponse to a plea for broad-mindedness in religious discourse: "...(B)roadmindedness is the opposite of what religious conviction enacts and requires. Religious conviction...requires narrowmindedness, the discovery of and hewing to the straight and narrow way." And "Religious discourse...cannot be unconcerned with the substantive worth and veracity of its assertions, which are in fact _presupposed_, and presupposed too is the urgency of proclaiming those assertions...to a world asked to receive them as the whole and necessary truth." In case we still don't get it, Fish says on page 21: "To put the matter baldly, a person of religious conviction should not want to enter the marketplace of ideas but to shut it down... The religious person should not seek an accommodation with liberalism; he should seek to rout it from the field, to extirpate it, root and branch."

Fish clearly means that all this should apply to _Christian_ religious language, which he would characterize as the only valid corpus of religious language, but he equally clearly is uncomfortable taking that stance. After all, he is a scholar. He doesn't really want to be seen as someone whose metacommunication can be summed up as "What I say is Christian, therefore everything that _you_ [you the non-Christian, or you the not-my-kind-of-Christian] say is unworthy of discussion." Unfortunately, that's what is presupposed by his own arguments. Much wiggling about ensues. (For Richard John Neuhaus' broadminded reply to Fish, "Why We Can Get Along" -- and Fish's lengthy dogged reply to that reply -- see pp. 27-40.) I recommend reading all three.

REQUEST FOR YOUR ADVICE

I'm getting ready to self-publish _Peacetalk 101_, which has been posted at the Lovingkindness site now for about a year; the feedback I've been getting from readers indicates that a print version is needed. Until a month ago I intended to have the printing done at Xlibris; they did a wonderful job with my _Language in Emergency Medicine_, and I would have gone to them again. But then they set up what I consider to be an insane new policy, pricing all their books so high that only someone who is truly desperate for a copy would buy them. (Xlibris, not the author, sets the prices for the books they produce.) I need to go to a different print-on-demand company, therefore, and would welcome your recommendations. If you can recommend a POD company with confidence, please let me know who they are and why you recommend them; I don't want to make a mistake with this book. Especially since I'm now working on _Peacetalk 102_ and a workbook to go with both books; I'd like to have the work done somewhere where I'd be satisfied enough to stay for the other two books. Thanks for your help.....

A LOVINGKINDNESS MORNING PRAYER

Holy One,
Thank you for bringing us safely through the day and night just past.
Thank you for the new day you have given us;
help us to use it joyfully and productively;
bless the work we do this day.
Watch over us, and watch over this sweet world.
And may everything that happens,
this day and this night,
be for the best.
Amen.

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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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