September/October 2005

THE RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE NEWSLETTER
Volume 6, Issue 5 -- September/October 2005
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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; Quotes & Comments; Cyberspace

EDITOR'S NOTE

September again .... it doesn't seem possible, but here it is. And that means that it's time for me to ask you please to start thinking about renewing your memberships (and your newsletters) for 2006. As always, if you're willing and able to renew early, that would be a tremendous help to me and I would be very grateful; cash flow here at OCLS is a trickle rather than a flow in late summer. As always, it will save me a great deal of extra work if your renewals reach me no later than December 15, 2005.

I'll be happy to send gift cards for you by either e-mail or postal mail, with a message of your choice, if you want to give gift memberships for the coming holidays. If you want cards sent by postal mail, please be sure your gift list (with addresses and desired messages) reaches me by December 1st, which is when the mails start slowing down dramatically. You'll find all the details about renewing in the paragraph right under the newsletter name and date above.

You'll notice as you read the Network Input section that members have done a great deal of my work for me in this issue, and that's wonderful; it was almost, briefly but blissfully, like having A Staff. My thanks to all of you for the many good things you send my way.

NETWORK INPUT --
MORE ABOUT SAINTS, OFFICIAL AND UNOFFICIAL

1. Sally Lloyd wrote:

"Episcopalians and Anglicans have saints and saints' days, but as they consider themselves Anglo-Catholic, all have been designated by the Catholic church. I think they all predate the sixteenth century split. The Anglican communion is not creating more saints (or they weren't when I went to Episcopal Seminary), and I don't think they officially recognize saints the Catholic Church created after the split.

"The Quaker testimony on equality prevents us from designating saints, although (maybe like Protestants) we refer to Saint Peter and Saint Paul sort of as if 'Saint' was their first name. We believe anyone can have a 'life that speaks' but occasionally someone remarkable comes along and affects the wider world.

John Woolman, who travelled in ministry in opposition to slavery in colonial times, and could labor with slave owners in such a peaceable manner as not to tick anybody off, is sometimes called 'the Quaker Saint'. George Fox, our founder, was a Difficult Person, so no one has offered to call him a saint even though he healed people and saw heavenly visions. Margaret Fell, who founded the social action/compassionate caretaking side of Quakerism (in addition to eventually marrying George) must have been a saint in the practical sense of the word and ought to be called one, but I don't know that she ever is."

**It seems very odd ... the idea of having a sort of cut-off date for the recognition of "real" saints.

[I want to mention here that I have just finished reading _The Peaceable Kingdom_ for the first time -- how I could have lived this long without reading it before, I don't know -- and would like to recommend it for its religious language. It wasn't always a pleasant read, especially in the sections on slavery, but in the context of religious language it was extraordinary. Whether it presents the Quaker faith accurately I cannot say; I _can_ say that it presents it vividly.]

2. Margaret Carter wrote:

"I was surprised at the comment that there is 'minimal overlap' between saints in the Catholic and the non-Catholic sense. I'm Episcopalian and was brought up Baptist. My impression is that all Christian denominations recognize the first-generation holy figures (Paul, Peter, et al) as saints, even though the evangelical wing might not use the term 'saint' often. The Roman Catholic church has recognized thousands of others, but it also retains all the universally acknowledged Christian saints from the first century. Also, many Protestants would informally refer to people such as St. Francis of Assissi as saints. The Episcopal Church certainly acknowledges many post-first-century saints and even recognizes saints' days. ... So it seems to me there's a lot of overlap, at least in the sense that saints recognized by most Protestants comprise a subset of the larger set of Catholic saints."

3. Rebecca Haden wrote:

"I think the Protestant use of 'saints' is typified by the use of the word in things like 'For All the Saints,' the great hymn by the great Ralph Vaughn Williams, and in the Apostles' Creed, which says 'I believe in... the communion of saints...' In this use it means Christians or members of the church, or something very broad like that. Catholic Saints are people who have been canonized. I have never heard 'St. Peter' or 'St. Paul' mentioned in a Baptist church -- I think Baptists are pretty anti-Catholic and would always say 'the Apostle Paul' ... In talking about Saints (in the Catholic sense) who have some other usual way to be identified, like Joan of Arc or Thomas Aquinas, I think Protestants usually do not use the 'Saint' part. I hear Catholics talk about their saints with first names and no accompanying 'Saint' when it is a saint of whom they are fond or to whom they feel close..."

4. Karen Stroup (in a very long and interesting and informative letter) wrote:

"I had a couple of thoughts about saints, Catholic and Protestant. You're right -- there are two definitions of 'saint,' and they barely overlap. Martin Luther specifically wrote against canonization; given his grace-oriented theology, it doesn't make sense for anyone to be credited with any greater holiness/saintliness than anyone else. Plus, as you know he was extremely set against the entire system of indulgences, and saints are an important aspect of the 'treasury of merit' against which ordinary people like us can borrow for help to get to heaven. After all, according to Luther, all are sinners, and one is either saved or damned; that status has everything to do with God's will and nothing to do with human action or choice.

"Most Protestants tend to use 'saint' in a very broad way, generally meaning someone whose life shows evidence of being a 'good Christian' (the quotation marks because I'm not sure exactly what that is). ... As in so many things, I found my sojourn in the Episcopal Church to be instructive in this matter given their adherence to the middle way. They DO have a calendar of saints, and while saints do not have the same place in a system of merit (because there is none in Episcopal theology), they most definitely are more than good Christians. ...

"I find the cult of the saints (in the technical sense) foreign to my sense of the way God works in the world, but aside from the merit system it's really pretty good theology. Along with relics, which no one but Catholics seems to understand, saints are obvious, close-to-earth, touchable representations of the importance of the doctrine of the incarnation."

5. Douglas Dee wrote:

"It seems to me we have to distinguish at least 3 senses of 'saint': Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant, and it seems to me that the Protestants, not the Catholics, are the odd one out. Although I gather that Catholic and Orthodox rules on sainthood are somewhat different, it seems they are fundamentally similar, and both have official procedures by which the church can recognize new saints. For Protestants, it appears to me, the only saints are a small number of Biblical personages, and there's no procedure to recognize more.

This leads me to a question: when you were growing up Baptist, what was your understanding of a saint? Exactly who is a saint? What criteria did these people have to meet to become recognized as saints? Who decided that those people actually met those criteria?"

**As a Baptist child, my understanding was that a saint was someone who was far more holy than the rest of us -- someone who actually managed to live up to his or her religious principles; it was the standard "folk" set of criteria, I'm sure, with no theological subtleties involved. As for who decided whether someone qualified as a saint, that isn't the thorniest question. We children were taught that only _God_ could know whether someone was or wasn't a saint; human beings weren't qualified to make that judgment. What was left out was how, precisely, God went about letting the rest of humanity _know_ that someone was a saint. I've thought long and hard, and I'm certain that that question was never raised and that nobody ever mentioned it. Most of what I remember hearing said about saints in the Baptist churches I attended as a child had to do with the prohibition against praying to them.

6. And then Douglas Dee amended the previous message:

"On second thought, I was too hasty in writing 'For Protestants, it appears to me, the only saints are a small number of Biblical personages. . .' Now that I think of it, I think at least some Protestant groups do appear to recognize a number of post-Biblical pre-Reformation saints. There's no reason to expect a unified Protestant position. Still, I haven't heard of any Protestant church with a procedure for recognizing new saints, and I've never heard anyone claim that, say, Calvin or Luther should be recognized as a 'saint' except metaphorically."

**This would be as good a place as any to point out that my Baptist denomination didn't consider itself part of the class of "Protestants." [Which would indicate a need for at least _4_ senses of "saint": Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, and Baptist.]We kids weren't allowed to attend anything billed as a "Protestant" religious function, which kept us home from any number of hayrides and picnics and summer camps and whatnots. Because, we were told: "Baptists aren't and never have been Protestants. Protestants belong to denominations that broke away from the Catholic Church. Baptists were the first 'real' Christian church, founded by Saint Peter himself in person in accordance with the instructions of Jesus, and have never been part of the Catholic Church."

I haven't heard this claim in many years, and I am no religious historian -- I can't say what its origins may have been. But it was presented to us, most explicitly, in the 1940s.

QUOTES & COMMENTS

1. After saying that "God bless America" is a traditional tagline for American presidential speeches, Bruce Lincoln goes on to say (of the current president's variation on that practice):

" 'May God continue to bless America,' however, goes beyond the conventional formula, and as such is linguistically marked. It suggests Bush and his speechwriters gave serious thought to the phrase and decided to emphatically reaffirm the notion that the United States has enjoyed divine favor throughout its history; moreover, that it deserves said favor insofar as it remains firm in its faith."

This is on page 30 of _Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11_, by Bruce Lincoln, published in 1992 by the University of Chicago Press. It's part of an excellent comparative analysis of religious language used by George W. Bush and Osama Bin Laden. I recommend the book, and I thank Diana Cook for sending my copy.

2. Here are two quotes from "New Light On The Torah," by Jaroslav Pelikan, in an article reviewing Robert Alter's _The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary_ (W.W. Norton), pp. 66-69 of the Summer 2005 _Claremont Review of Books_; on page 67:

"Translation, therefore, must at all costs avoid 'explaining the Bible instead of representing it in another language.' This 'heresy of explanation,' of which modern translators and commentators have frequently been guilty, easily 'trivializes the grand solemnity and epic sweep' of Biblical narrative... Where the Hebrew has 'solemn, emphatic reiteration of refrainlike phrases and entire clauses,' the translation should do the same."

"...[W]hen I studied Biblical Hebrew in 1942, six years before the founding of the State of Israel, there was no society where it was the official spoken and written tongue. Nowadays, the admonition of Leviticus 19:32, 'Before a gray head you shall rise,' can appear on Israeli buses to urge that passengers yield their seats to the elderly..."

Note: I don't know who I'm beholden to for the subscription to this publication, which -- while leaning farther to the right than I ever lean -- is always good reading. Whoever you are, thank you very much.

3. "Cobelligerency is a term popularized among evangelicals by Francis Schaeffer and frequently used by J.I. Packer to speak of Christians linked with one another against forces of evil in contemporary society. In a similar view, Timothy George, Southern Baptist theologian... has spoken of an 'ecumenism of the trenches.' "

These martial terms of religious language -- new to me -- come up in the context of evangelicals and Catholics joining together "to combat moral problems." The source is an article by Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom titled "Is the Reformation Over?", on p. 10-18 of the 7-8/05 issue of _Books & Culture_; the quote is from page 12. The article reports on the extraordinary uproar over a document called "Evangelicals and Catholics Together" (ECT, or ECT1). A large-type blurb on page 17 reads: "Evangelicals can wince at Peter Cram's description of Protestantism as 'one long, continuous line of protesters protesting against their fellow protesters, generating thousands of denominations.' "

4. The Summer 2005 _Books & Culture_ also had a very interesting article by Catherine and Andy Crouch titled "God the Economist: John Polkinghorne's Trinitarian reality," on pp. 22-23. Sample, from page 23:

"Polkinghorne's approach to the broader question of divine omnipotence with respect to creaturely freedom is ingeniously faithful to the twin witnesses of Christian orthodoxy and contemporary science: Whatever limitations of either knowledge or power God has in relation to the created world _are God's own doing_. The Creator is omnipotent -- there are no limitations on the kind of universe he could have created.... But the world that the Creator has in fact created is a world with space for freedom -- indeed, a world that seems astonishingly carefully prepared for the natural development of creatures that can exercise their freedom. In this world, God's knowledge and power are limited, but not because God is inherently limited. Rather, God has chosen to limit himself."

The article reviews Polkinghorne's _Science and the Trinity: The Christian Encounter with Reality_ (Yale University Press 2004), expanding a series of lectures given in 2003 at Princeton Theological Seminary.

5. "Born Again in the USA," by Jody Rosen (pp. 30-34 of the 7/4/05 issue of _The Nation_), reviewing Bruce Springsteen's album "Devils & Dust," tells us on page 32 that the album "is so thoroughly stuffed with religious imagery that it might as well be a gospel album." Because:

"There's that somber title song, about a soldier whose 'God-filled soul' is corrupted by warfare; a retelling of the Old Testament story of Leah; and a slew of biblical elocutions about 'fiery lanterns,' 'blood consecrated' streets, 'higher ground,' 'sweet salvation,' Ezekiel's valley of dry bones and 'the garden of Gethsemane' where Jesus 'beseeched his Heavenly Father to remove/The cup of death from his lips.' Not even Bob Dylan at the heart of his born-again phase managed to shoehorn a King James verb like 'beseeched' into a song."

Rosen goes on to say that Springsteen's God-talk is neither politics nor theology, but poetry, a distinction that I think might be hard to maintain; lots of poetry is also politics and/or theology. My thanks to Patricia Mathews for the copy.

6. Something interesting -- but not entirely clear to me -- appeared on page 8 of the 7/05 issue of _Sojourners_, in a piece by Robyn K. Dean titled " 'Be Opened!': Deaf Christians find liberation in Jesus' declaration." The essay begins by explaining that in Mark 7:31-37, traditionally considered the "healing" of a deaf man, "The word chosen by the writer of Mark's gospel does not mean 'to heal.' Rather than directing the deaf man to 'be healed,' the Markan Jesus commands 'ephphatha' -- be opened.' " Dean then goes on to discuss the fact that the Deaf community does not consider deafness a sickness or handicap that needs curing. "This means that the gospel must no longer be communicated to Deaf people... through the eyes, ears, mouths, and language of the hearing majority." She calls for "standardized ASL liturgies and the development of Deaf theology and spirituality." And she ends with the sentence that puzzles me, offering "the deliberate word choice used by Jesus in Mark's gospel" as "a theological directive for the liberation of the Deaf community: Be opened."

I truly don't understand. That is, my first interpretation would be that taking "Be opened!" as the meaning presupposes that being deaf/Deaf constitutes being "closed." In which case, I don't see how the resulting difference, although interesting, is liberating. I must be missing something here, or perhaps Dean's article was over-edited? Perhaps the suggestion is that the man Jesus ordered to "be opened" was closed only in the sense of having accepted the idea that deafness was a disorder? If that's it, the essay needs an additional clarifying paragraph making that an overt claim and arguing for it. Perhaps I've simply missed the point entirely; please feel free to enlighten me.

7. On pp. 18-19 of the 8/05 issue of _Reason_ (sent to me by Patricia Mathews), Cathy Young discusses a June conference at the American Enterprise Institute on "The New Neuromorality," with a star-studded list of speakers ... Steven Pinker, Joshua Greene, Martha J. Farah, Stephen Morse, and more. Young's title is clever: "Soul Survival: Is 'the new neuromorality' a threat to traditional views of right and wrong?" [That is, are we headed for a world where every misbehavior gets attached to it the claim that "my defective brain (or my defective genes) made me do it"?] The article needs to be read in its entirety, and is probably online, but I can't get to it -- I get only stern warnings about the inadequacy of my browser when I try; you may do better. Here's a sample, from pp. 18-19, about Joshua Greene's presentation:

"Greene noted that in all the debates about whether to blame the guilty person or his damaged brain, we assume some nonphysical core self -- a soul -- that makes moral judgments. What's going to happen as research in neuroscience explains more and more of the mind in physical and mechanical terms? The likelihood, said Greene, is 'a lot more fighting' about morality and responsibility unless we're willing to give up the idea of the soul altogether -- something that, he wryly noted, 'Americans are not yet ready to do.' " And, on page 19, he's quoted this way: "What we're saying is no one's really guilty in their souls because, secret: No one _has_ a soul."

Stephen Morse argued against all that, saying that we give people the punishment they deserve "because it's right," pointing out that we have no idea "how the brain enables the mind." And many speakers pleaded for caution in championing the new neuroscience technologies, lest people "be labeled sociopathic, dangerously impulsive, or otherwise suspect based on flawed data." Recommended.

8. I keep pleading for better communication between the Left and the Right, and more rigorous attention to the real world consequences of religious language in such communication. In that context, here's a relevant quote from Burt Neuborne's "Addicted to the Courts" (pp. 23-24, _The Nation_ for 4/25/05; on page 24):

"The margin of victory in the 2004 presidential election may well have come from religious believers in Ohio who voted against their economic self-interest to protest judicial decisions that appeared to them to attack their belief systems without good reason. As progressives, we owe it to our fellow citizens to seek to persuade them why it's fair to ask them to forgo acting on deeply felt beliefs."

CYBERSPACE

1. "19th century Mormonism is foreign to our modern conceptions of the Church. Praxis and culture have evolved such that it is improper to discuss the frank realities of our history in worship services. No aspect of this transformation is more acute than the dynamic role of women. And no woman is more iconoclastic than Zina Diantha Huntington Jacobs Smith Young.
"It is counterintuitive really. One would think that polygamy is the subjugation of women. To a certain extent, it probably was; the appellation alone of the fullness of the priesthood - the patriarchal order - is a violence to modern identity politics. There is, however, no doubt that women were concurrently liberated."

This is from "19th Century Mormonism and Radical Feminism," by J. Stapley, online at http://www.bycommonconsent.org/2005/07/19_century_mo.html . It fits neatly with a recent heated discussion at the Feminist Mormon Housewives blog that I've been following with interest, and to which I owe a sudden realization in The-Mote-In-One's-Own-Eye Mode. The discussion had to do with the ethics of the practice in Mormon nontechnical publications (such as _Ensign_) of sanitizing biographies of Mormon male eminences by leaving out all reference to their multiple wives, thus causing many Mormon women to simply disappear from history. I kept reading the comments and posts, and eventually it did occur to me that Baptists (and many other denominations) do exactly the same thing. When we publish nonscholarly articles about the Hebrew patriarchs, we never mention their multiple wives, much less their multiple concubines. Thus causing many more women to simply disappear from history. Amazing. My thanks to Stephen Marsh for alerting me to the material.

2. _SojoMail_ for 6/29/05 had an announcement of a "Spiritual Activism Conference to Create a Network of Spiritual Progressives," to be held in late July. It said:

"Friends of the Sojourners community are invited to join Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun, and many other religious leaders, at the Spiritual Activism Conference. ... The goals of the Network of Spiritual Progressives are to challenge the misuse of God and religion by the Religious Right as well as the 'religio-phobia' in some sections of progressive culture, and to replace the 'bottom line' of money and power with a 'new bottom line' of love, generosity, and wonder at the grandeur of creation.

3. _PCA News and Resources_ for 8/3/05 had an announcement for a new magazine called _Reformation 21_, online at http://www.reformation21.org :

"The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals has begun an online magazine called reformation21. ... It is intended to provide peer-reviewed biblical reflection, cultural engagement and academic commentary from pastor-theologians and churchmen on the crucial issues facing the church today. 'We aim to encourage biblical thinking, living, worship and ministry, as well as constructive, faithful cultural engagement. The tone of reformation21 is positive and pastoral, though we are unafraid to touch on the controversial and to provide criticism when necessary. It is designed to serve, edify, and educate Christians by presenting an authoritative reformed perspective, while embracing various denominational positions, on a variety of relevant historic matters, current issues, and thoughtful positions that inform, inspire, and challenge Christians to think and grow biblically'. "

>From the first issue's editorial:
"We want Reformation 21 to address cultural and social issues from a biblical perspective. The aim is to model how theology is done in the market place. The Bible has something to say about everything and too often, Christians have retreated either into a ghetto mentality of trying to avoid the world for fear of contamination through an inability to understand it and respond to it, or (which may well be worse) full-scale capitulation into the dual-life mentality allowing the Bible to shape one world (the church, the home) but not everything else. Both are hopelessly wrong and Reformation 21 will attempt to fill this gap."

Note: For me, the link for _Reformation 21_ doesn't work with Internet Explorer, but does work with my creaky old Netscape. Much to my surprise.

4. An item of religious language that was entirely new to me -- the term "pounding" -- turned up on my LiveJournal blog:

"When a member of the church family or community is having a difficult time making ends meet, the church members bring in food and household items to give to the person in need. I think it comes from the fact that each contributor usually brought a pound worth of goods."

5. One of my favorite blogs -- http://www.andrewtobias.com -- posted a 7/10/05 _NY Times_ editorial titled "It's All Happening at the Tulsa Zoo" on 8/3/05; here's an excerpt...

"Christian creationists won too much of a victory for their own good in Tulsa, where the local zoo was ordered to balance its evolution science exhibit with a display extolling the Genesis account of God's creating the universe from nothing in six days. A determined creationist somehow talked three of the four zoo directors, including Mayor Bill LaFortune, into the addition by arguing that a statue of the elephant-headed god Ganesh at the elephant house amounted to an anti-Christian bias toward Hinduism."

Many Tulsans were not pleased, and the directors issued a clarification saying that what they'd had in mind was that half a dozen different creation stories should get equal time. And "There was the rub: there are hundreds of creation tales properly honored by the world's... cultures, starting with the American Indian tribes around Tulsa."

6. _Religion Bookline_ for Wednesday, July 27, 2005 had a brief review of Bart D. Ehrman's _Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the New Testament and Why_ (Harper San Francisco):

"In the absence of any original manuscripts of the books of the New Testament, how can we be sure that we're getting the intended words and meaning? Ehrman... has devoted his life to the study of such questions and here offers an engaging and fascinating look at the way scholars try to answer them. Part memoir, part history, and part critical study, he traces the development of the academic discipline called textual criticism, which uses external and internal evidence to evaluate and compare ancient manuscripts in order to find the best readings. Ehrman points out that scribes altered almost all of the manuscripts we now have. His absorbing story, fresh and lively prose, and seasoned insights into the challenges of recreating the texts of the New Testament ensure that readers might never read the Gospels or Paul's letters the same way again."

7. The _New Scientist_ e-zine for 7/25/05 had a brief bit about a prayer research study for 700 heart surgery patients, headed by Mitchell Krucoff. The patients were divided into four groups, and "Established Jewish, Christian, Muslim or Buddhist congregations prayed for the patients in the first group." The second group got music, imagery, and touch therapy; the third got those three measures plus prayer, and a control group got only standard medical care. (The e-zine actually says the fourth group got "nothing," but I'm not taking that seriously.) Results (published in _The Lancet_) indicated that "prayer made no difference at all." However, I find Mitchell Krucoff's attitude both unusual and refreshing: "Despite the negative result, Krucoff is keen to do more studies. 'We know nothing about what we are doing here,' he says. 'We don't have a prayer-proof room.' "

Krucoff obviously realizes that no one has ever yet done an even modestly respectable study on this question. All the studies reported in the literature -- even those allegedly most rigorously double-blinded -- suffer from at minimum three major flaws. First: the terms are undefined; even the word "prayer" itself has yet to be properly defined. Second: As Krucoff clearly understands, no one has even the vaguest idea how to adjust a prayer study for the problem of "background prayer." We don't know how many people are out there praying for the sick; we have no way to shield individuals in a research study from the effects -- if any -- of that sort of "generic" prayer for the sick. Third: We have no idea how to formulate or use concepts such as "quality of treatment" and "frequency of treatment" and "dose/response relationship" in a medical prayer research study. It's as if we were trying to do research on the need for handwashing in medical care in a time when soap had not yet been discovered and "germs" was still an undefined term. We have both scientific hands tied behind our back. [My thanks to Diana Cook for alerting me to this item.]

8. Recently, the Intranet language/linguistics news site had a "squib" about the "Christian Rubik's Cube." "For centuries," it said, "missionaries have spread the Christian message with orthodox but limited tools. Translated Bibles. Gospel tracts. Picture books. But in east Africa, the Amazon and beyond, the faithful are turning to a more modern instrument to market the story of salvation. Called an EvangeCube -- or, by some, a Christian Rubik's Cube -- it's a religious takeoff on an old advertising gimmick that's ridden the rising tide of evangelism since being developed in Dallas seven years ago." The link that was offered for more information didn't provide any, and I've had no luck finding out anything more; a Google search gets lots of hits, but nothing useful. If any of you are familiar with the "EvangeCube" (or if any of you have better luck researching it than I've had), I'd be very interested in your input.

9. "President Bush waded into the debate over evolution and 'intelligent design' Monday, saying schools should teach both theories on the creation and complexity of life. In a wide-ranging question-and-answer session ... Bush essentially endorsed efforts by Christian conservatives to give intelligent design equal standing with the theory of evolution in the nation's schools. ... Bush declined to state his personal views on 'intelligent design' ...." Online at http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/ news/politics/12278405.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp .

10. "A broad group of U.S. and Canadian Muslim scholars and religious leaders last week issued a _fatwa_ that is as unequivocally anti-violence as those of Khomeini or Osama bin Laden were pro-murder: 'All acts of terrorism are _haram_, forbidden by Islam. It is _haram_, forbidden, to cooperate or associate with ... any act of terrorism or violence.' The declaration then went beyond familiar condemnations to demand action: It is the 'civic and religious duty of Muslims to cooperate with law enforcement authorities to protect the lives of civilians'."

This comes from "A welcome fatwa," an editorial available online at http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-fatwa2aug02,0,4741830,print.story . It ends by noting that the government has been "curiously reticent" in its reponse, and suggesting that it "would be encouraging for these Muslims to hear publicly from President Bush or at least Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff on that point."

12. There's a very interesting item online at the Gospel.com site, on the necessity for the Christian religious Right websites to take steps to draw in non-Christians and keep them coming back, suggesting that "churchy jargon" and "Christianese" should not be used, that "bridge pages" on secular topics should be added, that "churchy" images like doves and stained glass windows should be avoided... and much more. Much like the Republican party's communication guides for politicians. A sort of stealth guide. Unless I've totally misunderstood the material, which is of course possible, it's a set of guidelines on how to pretend that you're not really a Christian website for a while, until your visitor is suitably relaxed.

I took particular note of guideline #15's directive that "The entire site must be user-friendly to non-Christians," because I have almost never had so much difficult accessing and navigating a website as I had with this one; it fought me every step of the way. I was finally able to print out the materials -- in very large bold type, page after page of it -- by "capturing" it with a hifalutin graphics program on another computer, transferring it to a CD, loading that into my computer and then printing the resulting file. It was worth the trouble.... and of course it had become a matter of principle before it was over.

13. Cyberplaces to check out .... An interesting and clever piece on the religious inclinations of George W. Bush, with (in the comments) a collection of quotations of his religious language, at http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/01/06/224322.php (sent by Rebecca Haden); The Dictionary of Religion site, at http://dictionary.gospelcom.net/; an anti-Creationism article by Richard Dawkins at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-196-1619264-196,00.html; an overview of Dominionism, at http://www.religioustolerance.org/reconstr.htm ; "Greek church musicians to hear new chants," at http://www.post-gazette.com /pg/pp/05193/536521.stm ; a long article on "Church English" at http://englishbibles.blogspot.com .

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