September/October 2002 Newsletter

THE RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE NEWSLETTER
Volume 3, Issue 5 -- September/October 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. ==========================================================
IN THIS ISSUE: Editor's Note; Quotes & Comments; Network Input; Booknotes -- Controversy and More Controversy; Cyberstuff; And Still More Controversy....; Announcement

EDITOR'S NOTE

Greetings, and my sincere thanks for all the excellent materials that you've been sending.

Because September is here, it's time to start thinking about renewing your Network membership for 2003. I'm glad to have payments and will cheerfully accept them -- but the deadline for payment ($5.00 for regular membership, or $15.00 for Supporting Membership) doesn't come along until December 31st. However, the earlier you let me know that you _plan_ to renew, the less of a fandango the 2003 mailing-list chaos will be for me. I'd be very grateful for the advance information, at your convenience.

QUOTES & COMMENTS

1. About nonstandard dialects, and the way "standard" speakers perceive them:

"The dialect of Aramaic used in Galilee seems to have been a permanent topic of sarcasm in Jerusalem circles. ... The most striking jibe castigates the notoriously slipshod enunciation of words beginning with a guttural...consonant. It ridicules a Galilean in Jerusalem trying to buy something in the market. The merchants, unable to make out what he wanted when asking for something which sounded like _amar_, taunted him, 'You stupid Galiliean, do you need something to ride on [_hamar_, "a donkey"] or something to make a dress with [_'amar_, "wool"], or something for a Temple sacrifice [_immar_, "lamb"]?' ... In the light of this story, the Gospel account of Peter's denial of Jesus appears in a new perspective. When he insisted that he did not know 'that man,' some Jerusalem bystanders in the courtyard of the high priest retorted, 'Certainly you are one of them, for your accent betrays you."... [_From _The Changing Face of Jesus_, by Geza Vermes, Viking 2001, pp. 243-244; my thanks to Rebecca Haden for the copy.]

2. From a story in _PCA News_ for 7/18/02, titled "Missionaries Conquer Ancient Foes with Cutting-Edge Technology":

"In a growing trend toward mobility in ministry, many foreign and domestic missionaries are trading in their paper books for eBooks. With today's small laptops, missionaries bring hundreds or thousands of reference works to far-flung places using only their carry-on luggage. They don't have to pay high airfreight charges, the books don't get moldy or wet or stolen in transit and can be easily transported once on the ground. Missionaries stationed in remote locations can get new books almost instantly by unlocking them from a CD or downloading them from the Internet. Doug Higby of Wycliffe Bible Translators received timely assistance with his translation work in Mali, West Africa. By using a short-wave radio to download unlock codes he gained rapid access to an essential book, literally saving a trip to Timbuktu. ... When it comes to digital books, missionaries are ahead of the technology curve."

The story says only "small laptops"; I suspect that the even-smaller PDAs are also being used as reference libraries. (Yesterday I saw an ad for Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Greek for the Palm, from Zondervan.) I'll be using my own Palm 125 that way just as soon as I figure out how to get books _into_ it.

3. My thanks to Sally Lloyd for "Apocalyptic fiction tops bestseller lists," by Bennie M. Currie, _Lansing State Journal_ for 7/22/00, which tells us that the _Left Behind_ series has had "Harry Potter-like sales" and says that:

"The basis for the string of apocalyptic plot twists is Dispensationalism, an offshoot of Evangelical Protestant theology followed by many Evangelic Christians, including Jenkins and LaHaye. [Jenkins and LaHaye are the authors of the _Left Behind_ series.] They believe the Rapture will be followed by a Tribulation, a seven-year period that will be ruled by the Antichrist before it is ended by an Apocalypse and the Second Coming of Christ."

The "Harry Potter-like sales" were less than 20 million copies when the Currie story was written; the most recent figures, which include sales of the companion series for children, are more than 60 million.

4. "[A]mong man-made evils one finds distinctions between the mindset of the perpetrator who does evil under the illusion that he's doing _good_ and that of the evildoer who knows he's committing a crime. The latter falls into a more rarefied category in the literature: one often called 'wickedness,' which can itself be divided into 'ordinary wickedness,' 'selfish wickedness,' 'conscientious wickedness,' heteronomous (just following orders) wickedness,' and the highest (or lowest) degree, 'malignant wickedness' -- doing evil for evil's sake."

Amazing. A taxonomy of evils! This is from "Degrees of Evil," by Ron Rosenbaum, _Atlantic Monthly_ for 2/02, pp. 63-68; on page 63. Rosenbaum goes on to discuss Hitler and Osama bin Laden, in the context of this taxonomy. My thanks to Pat Mathews for the copy.

5. I'm not going to renew our subscription to _Research News & Opportunities in Science and Theology_; it's expensive, and I haven't been impressed with it. However, I'm glad that I was still subscribed for the 7-8/02 Summer issue, which has a special section called "Discussions on the Cutting Edge of Spiritual Information," carrying interviews with Arthur Peacocke, Paul Davies, and a number of other notables. Peacocke, on page 4, says: "We are witnessing the arrival of a kind of 'religious correctness,' which attributes genuine commitment and faith only to those subscribing to a certain very narrow, biblicist interpretation of Christian belief." And "...[W]hatever God is, God is ultimately ineffable and beyond all human language. ... There is a danger when people write any theology, including theology and science, of kicking the word 'God' around like a football, as if one really knows that to which one is referring." Paul Davies, on page 11: "...[M]ost of the world's great religions are rooted in ancient scriptures, which are thousands of years old, and they really need to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. ... The vast mass of the public still supposes that church doctrine is Adam and Eve and special creation, and yet these are things that were rejected a century ago or more. It is now time for the clergy to come clean with their flock...." Much more, and much of great interest. The address is PO Box 5065, Brentwood, TN 37024-5065, e-mail custserv@sunbeltfs.com.

6. "We are puzzled by wars that persist. We are now puzzled by the Middle East. We are puzzled by Israel and the Palestinians. We don't know why they can't solve it, and that's our best American impulse I think -- just to put an end to it. We say, you can't go on fighting forever like the Hatfields and McCoys. Move to California. Move to Georgia. Leave your in-laws behind. Do something, but don't get mired in the past. It's brilliant. The tragedy and irony is, many of us belong to memory religions, and this is the great, continiual contradiction in our lives. We come out of a culture that is so individualistic, so Hellenistic, so centerered on the individual's possibilities of redefining, re-imagining himself as herself, whatever -- and we are also people who call ourselves Christians and Jews and Muslims, and therefore belong to tribal religions, religions of memory which by their nature imply that we belong to an entire tradition. We have never been able to resolve the two impulses, and so we are constantly at war."

That's Richard Rodriguez, in an interview in the Spring 2002 issue of _Image_ (pp. 53-68, on page 63). A great deal of _Image_ material, including wonderful art, is online at http://www.imagejournal.org.

7. And in the Winter 2001 issue of _Image_, Frank R. Desidero, CSP, writes about making a movie:

"We were making an icon, an image intended to move people to contemplate the divine -- and to be commercially successful, a tension I assume did not plague ancient iconographers. The day we filmed the crucifixion, just as we got Jonathan Scarfe, our Jesus, up on the cross, the caterers came around with the morning snack: pizza and panini. Standing before that icon, many of us couldn't eat. We were taken to a different place; making the movie had become a prayer. Others munched away as Christ was crucified -- for them it was just another movie, just another day on the set, just another shoot. The culture of commercial enterprise clashes with the culture of piety. ["Visual Ecclesiology: A Priest Producer Reflects on Making the Movie _Judas_", pp. 111-118; on p. 113.]

8. I've been putting off mentioning this item, sent to me by Patricia Mathews long ago -- and my dallying makes no sense. I've been putting it off because the article carefully tries to demolish the core narrative of a religious faith -- Wicca -- and it seems to me that that's hurtful. I've never let that possibility keep me from mentioning any of the many attempts in recent years to demolish the core narratives of Judaism and Christianity, however. For me to apply a different standard here is nothing but bias; it's like saying that Wicca is a faith too frail to bear challenge. No more dallying: I recommend that you read "The Scholars and the Goddess," by Charlotte Allen, on pp. 18-22 of the 1/01 _Atlantic Monthly_. The blurb below the title says "Historically speaking, the 'ancient' rituals of the Goddess movement are almost certainly bunk," which will give you an idea why I've hesitated. At least, when there are articles claiming that much of the Old Testament lacks historical validity, it's worded that way -- "lacks historical validity"; the Jesus Seminar confines itself to statements like "There is no evidence that Jesus said that." The writers use words like "myth," not words like "bunk." On page 19, Allen writes: "In all probability, not a single element of the Wiccan story is true. The evidence is overwhelming that Wicca is a distinctly new religion, a 1950s concotion.... Furthermore, scholars generally agree that there is no indication, either archaological or in the written record, that any ancient people ever worshipped a single, archetypal goddess -- a conclusion that strikes at the heart of Wiccan belief."

I ask you: Did Allen _have_ to use the word "concoction"? I suppose it's the disrespectful, trivializing, _tone_ of this article that has bothered me so. On the other hand, it's easy to imagine the Romans lounging around the banquet tables making remarks about Christianity and calling it whatever was the Latin word of the day for "concoction".....

NETWORK INPUT

1. Rebecca Haden wrote (with names changed to protect privacy): "I've just returned from an annual Prayer Breakfast... All denominations of people attend, as well as non-religious people. Mary Smith asked us to bow our heads and then gave a speech. It included many statements like "I believe we can pull together as a community," but had not a single thing addressed to God in it. She finished with "amen." Listeners' reactions varied -- some lifted their heads partway through when it was clear that there wasn't going to be a prayer... but all the various types of final "amen" (according to denomination) were heard. A city official said we were united in love of life and love of the spirit in his non-prayer. The person giving the speech for the occasion began with a prayer, without announcing it as a prayer, and went seamlessly _into_ her speech. Some audience members joined in (bowing heads, raising hands, joining the amen, etc.) and some treated it as a speech. We had a rabbi and a priest reading scripture; the priest asked everyone to stand for the 'reading of the Holy Gospel' but the rabbi asked for (and received) no physical response. ... The Protestant rep then led a prayer, ending it with 'with respect to all, in the name of the Son, Jesus Christ.' The 'respect to all' part was the only nonstandard bit of the prayer. The musicians sang some prayer-shaped things and some not so, and audience members decided for themselves whether to respond as to a prayer or to a performance or both. I'm not sure whether this is most interesting to me as an example of how a pluralistic society deals with the variety of available prayer experiences, or as an example of how we use linguistic information to decide whether we are engaged in a religious experience."

**This is a terrific example of a multicultural religious language "discourse analysis" problem, and one that's new to me. I've often seen the "Eeek, it's a prayer, what do I do?!" scenario, where the only comfortable people are those who have only one bodyparl cluster [Bow your head; close your eyes; put your hands together in prayer position (optional); be silent till it's over] in their vocabulary. Meanwhile, everybody else divides into three groups: those who are peeking at others out of the corners of their eyes for clues about what to do; those who are militantly looking straight ahead with open eyes to demonstrate that _they're_ not praying; and the compromisers who have settled for a minimalist lowering of their eyes, easily cancelled if it turns out that not-praying would be cooler. I've never had the opportunity to see people react to "Eeek, maybe it's a prayer, maybe it isn't, what do I do?!" .

2. [I _think_ this next item is from Elizabeth Barrette; correct me if I'm wrong and I'll print the correction next time.] I had said that I hadn't realized there might be varying theological consequences linked to whether religious language was read from a scroll or a book or a computer screen or a Palm Pilot or... et cetera; here's the response, addressing the different theological consequences for both reader and writer:

"Or a large rock, or a slab of clay, or the tanned hide of a buffalo. I have been fortunate enough to experience a few examples of sacred (and other) writings in earlier media. It can indeed make a difference. Oh, the ideas are the most important part ... but to feel the wet clay under your hands as you wield the stylus is so different from feeling pencil and paper, or a keyboard. To feel a stone wall beneath your fingers is an awesome experience. A buffalo hide was originally read flat -- you could walk around it to see the symbols right-side-up if you wanted to. A scroll keeps wanting to roll up on you, limiting your reading space to a few lines. A book is a hefty weight in your lap, and you can stick your fingers in it to read sections that are far apart. Words on a computer screen are fleeting, ephemeral things. The energy is so very different. ... If you had to chisel everything into a rock, and it took weeks to do, wouldn't you make EVERY word count?"

3. In response to my surprise at Quaker Gerald Priestland saying "the fact is that we deserve nothing, and it's amazing what we do get, even so," Sally Lloyd writes to clarify matters:

"You might find anything at all coming from a Quaker, because we each speak on that topic from our individual experience. Our testimonies... are consistently Quaker because they are about how we treat other people and the world and those are the things we stand for. The relationship with God is based on individual experience. Something in Priestland's experience makes 'deserve' an important category for him in relationship to God, in a way that may be different from any other Quaker. These differences are why listening to each other is so important. Priestland is not speaking for Quakerism or anyone other than himself. If he said that God told him to go rob a bank and use the money to buy everything in the local mall, thus violating the testimonies of integrity and simplicity, THAT would be surprising coming from a Quaker."

4. In the last issue I objected to the idea that a God capable of carrying out a Rapture would not park the cars and land the planes and so on. Anne Newkirk Niven wrote back with this:

"In my reading of the eschatology of the Rapture, the fact that God is gonna grab all the born-agains and haul them to heaven, leaving their cars and airplanes to crash and burn, seems _perfectly_ consistent with the basic premise of the event itself. Namely, the Rapture is intended to _reward_ good Christians by removing them from Earth before the nastiness of the Anti-Christ and Armaggedon, etc. get too out of hand. Those of us (as a Pagan, I presume I'll be 'left behind') who aren't _rewarded_ by being carried off by God are in fact, being _punished_ for our lack of belief: the chaos caused by all the airplane, car, and shopping-cart wrecks is merely detritus compared to all the other stuff we can expect to endure. ... Needless to say, that's not the spin that the evangelicals put on it, but it seems to me self-evident that the chaos caused by not parking the cars, etc. is _not_ accidental, but is, indeed, part of the Plan. This doesn't put God in a very good ethical light, but then, anyone who buys this whole scenario would be hard pressed to defend God's actions except by the old chestnut "If God does it, it must be Good" which sidesteps the entire issue. The question is not, in my mind, whether God (as postulated by the 'Left Behind' storyline) is incompetent but the far more disturbing, and fundamental question of whether such a God is Good."

**It would _never_ have crossed my mind that letting driverless-due-to-Rapturing cars crash head-on into other cars and kill all their passengers could be part of the punishment planned for those who don't qualify for Rapturing! Never. I'm not sure why I find it so astonishing. Anyone have a suggestion?

5. I've been studiously avoiding a stack of your e-mails that I can summarize as follows: "What is your theory of prayer, Suzette?" I can't go on this way, just not answering; I either have to answer or say straight up that I refuse to answer -- and refusing would be cowardly. This kind of thing is hard; it makes me uneasy. But I'll try to answer, as long as you realize that I'm not likely to be able to answer very clearly and that I'm only offering an opinion. Here goes....

Suppose that we take "God exists" and "Prayer works" as axioms, for purposes of this discussion; suppose those two axioms are valid. Then my theory is that the answer to a prayer will be yes when that fits God's ultimate plan and no when it doesn't. However, this isn't a binary process. Good and effective plans are _tree_ structures, with lots of branches; I perceive the divine Plan as a _spherical_ tree structure. Often there are many phenomena that will fit God's plan -- lots of different subplans all leading to the same node on the Plan Tree. God will then choose among all those subplans, and prayers carry weight in that choice.

BOOKNOTES -- CONTROVERSY AND MORE CONTROVERSY

1. _What's A Christian To Do with Harry Potter?_, by Connie Neal; Waterbrook Press 2001; ISBN 1-57856-471-9, and ....
2. _The Gospel According to Harry Potter: Spirituality in the Stories of the World's Most Famous Seeker_, by Connie Neal; Westminster John Knox Press 2002; ISBN not available at time of writing

These two books need to be reviewed together, because the second book takes up the premise of the first and puts it to use; they are unquestionably a set. Both are openly and unabashedly Evangelical, making very heavy and constant use of religious language and the evangelical language register. (Those for whom this is not a comfortable variety of language behavior will find it annoying, but the books are of course written for readers who _are_ comfortable with it.) Both rest on a single premise and metaphor: When human beings look at clouds and see pictures in them, they tend to find what they're looking for; in the same way, human beings looking at books tend to find what they're looking for too. Neal says that if you approach the Harry Potter books expecting to find them wicked and dangerous, that's how you'll perceive them; in these two books, however, she tries to show readers that when you approach the books looking for Christian imagery and content, you will find that instead, and that this is in fact the correct perception.

In _What's A Christian To Do...._, Neal presents a careful argument, backed with biblical material; she explains what the Bible says about the occult, discusses many examples, and offers parents ideas for using the material to explain to children why the occult is forbidden. She provides a selection of commentary about the Harry Potter books from various Christian publications. She presents an ingenious case for Daniel as a role model for youngsters, because he was in the occult world but not of it, educated in occult practices but unwilling to use them. Chapter Eleven, "Using Harry Potter to Preach the Gospel: Turning Stories into Evangelistic Tools," is followed in the table of contents by: "Learn how to use Harry's story to preach the gospel in a relevant way"; it anticipates the second book. On page 166 Neal writes, "I propose that the Harry Potter books are deeply moral and can be highly instructive as 'training in righteousness' if one rightly aligns these stories to Scripture"; then, in the second book, she demonstrates at length and in detail how that can be done.

_The Gospel According to..._ (which is about the whole Bible, not just the gospels or the New Testament), analyzes each of the first four Harry Potter books in this framework, offering detailed examples of the method that Neal recommends. In the table of contents (page v), the chapter titled "Glimmers of the Gospel in Book One...." has 20 subheads, including "The Curse of Death and the Boy Who Lived," "Dumbledore's Dire Warning," "Harry's Battle with the Dark Lord," "Why the Evil One Could Not Touch Harry"... and sixteen more. Each section has an introduction that establishes the context.

I learned a great deal from these two books. Neal claims that the Bible says (a) it _is_ possible to summon evil spirits, communicate with the dead, and the like, but (b) those things are flatly forbidden, and (c) human beings are to seek nothing "supernatural" except God. She contends that parents can use the Harry Potter books to teach these tenets, and should take advantage of that opportunity, especially since the books are so wildly popular. The case she builds is very interesting, and much of her argument was new to me. Rowling's triumph, Neal says on p. 19 of _What's a Christian To Do..._, is that she has created "a 'cool' good kid." Recommended.

3. _The Gospel of Mary Magdalene_, by Jean-Yves Leloup, English translation and notes by Joseph Rowe, foreword by Jacob Needleman; Inner Traditions 2002, ISBN 089281911-1.

It may be that the claims made in this book are old hat in theological circles; because I don't move in those circles, I have no way of knowing. To me -- even though I was already familiar with the Magdalene text -- they were astonishing, in two ways. I was surprised by Leloup's interpretation of the document (about which I'm not competent to comment); I was even more surprised by his meta-interpretation. On page 6, he says:

"The difficulty of acceptance of this text turns out to be one of the most interesting things about it. For this is a gospel that was at least inspired (if not literally written down) by a woman: Miriam of Magdala. Here she is neither the sinful woman of the canonical Gospels, nor is she the woman of more recent traditions, which confuse her sin with some sort of misuse of the lively power of her sexuality. Here, she is the intimate friend of Yeshua [Jesus], and the initiate who transmits his most subtle teachings."

The book's foreword explains (on page v) that "the Gospel of Mary first came to light in Cairo in 1896, some fifty years before the revolutionary discovery in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, of what have come to be known as the Gnostic gospels..." And if I understand Leloup and Rowe correctly, the claim is that what has happened to this document is yet another example of an attempt to make the work of some woman (whether written or spoken) disappear from history. This is obvious when pointed out, I suppose, but it had not occurred to me. "Not only was Miriam of Magdala a woman, she was a woman who had access to sacred knowledge," Leloup writes on page 13. "Given the era in which she lived, this is enough to have rendered her an outcast or a sinner in many eyes. She was outside the laws of a society where such knowledge is strictly the affair of men.... In her gospel her way of speaking to the disciples is bound to irritate them -- Who does she think she is?" I've said that I'm not competent to comment on the translation and commentary itself; I'll quote, therefore, from the cover: "What emerges from this important source text and commentary is a renewal of the sacred feminine in the Western spiritual tradition and a new vision for Christian thought and faith throughout the world."

The book is beautifully printed and produced. It's not an easy read -- which is not at all surprising, given its subject, plus the fact that it is a translation into English of a French translation of a Coptic document with numerous missing pages! I recommend it nevertheless, and am pleased to have had the opportunity to read it.

CYBERSTUFF

1. If you'd like to read John Rennie's "15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense" (from _Scientific American_) and Jonathan Sarfati's rebuttal of Rennie, the URLs for the two pieces are online at http://www. sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000D4FEC-7D5B-1D07-8E49809EC588EEDF &pageNumber=1&catID=2 and http://www.answersingenesis.org/news/scientific_ american.asp.

2. Suzanne Wash recently posted information about a source for recordings of Native American languages -- the Global Recordings Network (aka Gospel Recordings), at http://members.aol.com/grnlanglist/us.htm: "It has evangelical messages in several thousand languages, including many indigenous languages of the Americas. Global Recordings Network keeps paperwork on who made the recordings, including the names of the Indian speakers, and the date the recordings were made. Cost: The recordings are free, especially for those who plan to use the recordings for religious purposes. However, they would appreciate donations. I would suggest that you send them a donation of at least $3 per tape."

3. An article by Alison Boden titled "Political Uses of Christianity in the US" is at http://www.alumni.uchicago.edu/gateway/support_resources-boden.html. Much of the focus is on the use of Christian religious _language_ for political purposes; recommended.

4. From "What Would the Goddess Do?", by Starhawk, in "Recovering from Terrorist Attacks: The Spiritual Challenge," on beliefnet [URL not available at time of writing] for 7/26/02:

"Witches know that words have power. If we continue to call this attack an 'act of war,' we turn the perpetrators into martyrs and heroes. A criminal act of murder is seen as despicable, but an attack on the heartland of the enemy in wartime is seen as admirable. If we go to war over this, we dignify the perpetrators. Instead we should call for them to be brought to justice and tried in a court of law."

Words have power, yes; more specifically, metaphors -- composed of words -- have power. The terrorist as warrior is one thing; the terrorist as thug is quite another.

5. There is a splendid "Women and Religion; Web Resources" document by Kathleen O'Grady, at http://www.aarweb.org/syllabus/syllabi/o/ogrady/ women_and_religion_web_resources-ogrady.html; it's more than worth the hassle of dealing with that URL. Categories here, with links and annotations, include: Women and Religion: General; Women and Ancient Goddess Traditions; Women and Judaism; Women and Christianity; Women and Islam; Women and Hinduism; Women and Buddhism; Women and Aboriginal Religions; Women and African Religious Traditions; Women in Paganism, Wicca, and New Age Religions. Subheads in each category include: Web Sites; Books; Other Media; Online & Distance Courses; and more. Really useful, for all genders.

6. "For evangelical Christians with an interest in prophecy, the headlines always come with asterisks pointing to scriptural footnotes. That is how Todd Stranberg reads his paper. By day he is fixing planes at Offutt Air Force Base in Bellevue, Neb. But in his off hours, he's the webmaster at raptureready.com and the inventor of the Rapture index, which he calls a 'Dow Jones Industrial Average of End Time activity. ... The index hit an all-time high of 182 on Sept. 24, as the bandwidth nearly melted under the weight of 3 million visitors; any reading over 145, Strandberg says, means 'Fasten your seat belt.' " (In "Apocalypse Now," by Nancy Gibbs, _Time_ for 7/1/02, pp. 40-48; on page 41.)

7. I've mentioned in earlier newsletters that Aramaic (the language spoken by Jesus) is still spoken in the Syrian village of Maalula. For a link to recordings of some musical portions of a Good Friday service in Maalula, sung in Aramaic, go to http://phoenicia.org/artmusic.html.

AND STILL MORE CONTROVERSY...

First I saw a note in _PCA News_ for 8/20/02 saying that "America's Roman Catholic bishops and leaders of Reform and Conservative Judaism have issued a joint statement affirming that the Jewish people should not be targeted for conversion to Christianity," and quoting from an Associated Press story: "While the Catholic Church regards the saving act of Christ as central to the process of salvation for all, it also acknowledges that Jews already dwell in a saving covenant with God." (The statement is in a document titled "Reflections on Covenant and Mission.") This got my attention, and I went straight to Google for more information. Here are a few samples from my search, with URLS; your comments would of course be welcome.

1. "US Bishop's Committee Rejects Evangelization of Jews" [no byline -- _EWTN News_ for 8/14/02], says the statements about no conversion-targetings were part of a document called a "consultation," which also says that "God's covenant with the Jews has never been revoked." And then: "In a front-page story on the document, the Boston Globe pointed out that the statement puts the US bishops' representatives at odds with leading Evangelical Protestant groups...." This story is at http://www.ewtn.com/vnews/getstory.asp? number=28792.

2. " 'Reflections' Represent Present State of Dialogue, Cardinal Says" [at http://www.usccb.org/comm/archives/2002/02-161.htm] quotes Cardinal William H. Keeler (identified as "the U.S. Bishops' Moderator for Catholic-Jewish relations") saying that the document does not represent a formal position taken by the bishops and was made public "to encourage serious reflection on these matters by Jews and Catholics."

3. "Catholic mission to Jews ends," by Uwe Siemon-Netto, in the _Jewish World Review_ for 8/15/02 quotes Methodist pastor and theologian Thomas C. Oden as agreeing with the Catholic position: "What I would like to see is Jews becoming good Jews -- and let G-d do the rest. I take a two-covenant view." This, Siemon-Netto says, means "on the one hand G-d's promise to the people of Israel, and to the 'new Israel,' or the Christian Church, on the other." And...

"[T]he Catholic Reflections underscore a rarely mentioned translation issue in the Great Commission (Matthews 28:19), where Jesus commands his followers to make 'disciples of all nations.' In the Greek original of this text, the word 'ethne' is used for what became 'nations' in English. The authors of the Catholic reflections remind their readers that 'ethne' is the cognate of the Hebrew 'goyim,' meaning nations other than Israel." (This article is very interesting -- I recommend reading it in full. It's at http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0802/mis sion_ends.asp.)

[Note, while I'm here, from material forwarded to me by Hal Davis: "Based on the words in Deut. 12:3-4, the Rabbis deduced that it is forbidden to erase the name of G-d from a written document. Since any paper upon which G-d's name was written might be discarded and thus 'erased', the Rabbis forbade explicitly writing the name of G-d, except in Holy Books, with provisions for the proper disposal of such books. ... As a result of this, people acquired the habit of not writing the full name down in the first place. Strictly speaking, this only applies to Hebrew on a permanent medium, but many people are careful beyond the minimum, and have applied it to non-Hebrew languages. Hence, 'G-d' ..."]

ANNOUNCEMENT

I want to let you know that I'm removing the novel _Peacetalk 101_ from the Lovingkindness website. For one thing, it has been there a long time, and should probably be replaced with newer content. For another, I need to bring the book out in print form so that money from its sales can be used to support the website. (We are at last coming to the end of the generous donation that has been covering our expenses, and must look for new funding.) When the print version is available for sale, I'll post the information. Thank you for all the comments and suggestions that you've sent about the book; they've been extremely helpful.

TO JOIN A NETWORK AND RECEIVE ITS NEWSLETTER: Send newsletter title, your e-mail address, and your check, money order, or credit card information (for Visa or Mastercard) to OCLS, PO Box 1137, Huntsville, AR 72740-1137 USA. E-mail newsletters by Suzette Haden Elgin for 2002 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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