For me, there’s a problem with calling God our “Parent” instead of our “Father.” Besides being distracting, it breaks down the felt relationality of the analogy: No one I know calls either of their parents individually their “parent.” Calling God “Parent” makes Him alien.
You might say that God is alien, and that calling things as they are is good. I grant the point. Yet I say that more than that, calling God “Parent,” before foregrounding any actual theological point, foregrounds the supposed sensitivity of the speaker to other people’s theological hang-ups. That’s its purpose.
And even though it does highlight the theological fact of God’s non-sexed alienness and thus can be said to offer a true good, it does so at the cost of losing the greater good: In so-called progressive churches, it’s more important that we linguistically fortify our relationship with God than that we fortify our understanding of His alienness. I’d rather (and occasionally do) call God “Mother” than “Parent.”
Had I written a sign for today’s protest, it would’ve born the boringly straightforward “Our president is a capricious, narcissistic incompetent.” I didn’t. But I did initiate a short, catchier chant: “Dump Trump! He’s a chump!” People seemed to like it.
I feel ambivalent about most display protests, including this one, mostly because (1) I’m frequently niggling about the imprecise match between what I think and what I hear and read other participants thinking (e.g., for me, it’s “No kings but Jesus”), and (2) I harbor doubts about their efficacy and thus fear that they sap energy that’d be otherwise and better deployed toward direct action and participation in governance itself. I’m probably wrong about that second reason.
Self care is a necessary evil, and for me, at least, it’s not as necessary or as frequently necessary as you think. More important are self differentiation, authentic self expression, and engagement of self with the world and with the God who made it.
“Why does my heart feel so bad? Why does my soul feed so bad?” All year, You’ve had the strangle moral imperative to joy buzzing around my ears. It could be that I’m putting too much stock in a single command of Paul’s. But with:
“get to” being the word of the year,
Travis having made such an impression on me with the primacy he assigns to joy, and
all the specific words that have come to me on the subject this year,
it has been hard to avoid. And more than ever, the role of joy as an anchor for the words I say to others remaining words of life and not words of death has become apparent. I may not need to dig the well of self-love in order to love others, as so many folks extrabiblically claim, but I do apparently need to dig the well of joy: I have spoken brusquely again and again in recent weeks—this despite all the recent emphasis I have placed in my mind on letting “all my words be full of grace.” Why? Because it’s “out of the overflow of the heart” that “the mouth speaks.” If I feel despair, resentment, embarrassment, or any of joy’s other foils, I will not be able to keep those feelings off my tongue. Hence my alienating Carla yesterday evening after ending the workday feeling embarrassed and guilty that I had wasted an hour (at least) trying to coax ChatGPT and Gemini into providing me with business-hours difference formula I could use in a Salesforce report for Mike when a simple, classic Google search would have led me straight to the answer I sought. Hence my boorishly declaring my annoyance to Carla midmorning today after I spent two-and-a-half hours reviewing the College Township timeline into which she herself has put uncounted hours, a double layer of resentment (her absence and my feeling dragged into it). If I am unhappy, I am more likely—far more likely—to inflict my unhappiness on those around me. As such, digging and tending the well of joy—guarding my heart, as it were—is a moral prophylactic. Joy waters love. If any sentiments might be blocking or contaminating that well, I must spend the time and thought necessary to clear those sentiments out.
I’m not sure I enjoy any sociospatial context more than free-spirited, small-group conversation at a table at Webster’s Bookstore Café, surrounded by the sight and smell of used books, the taste of good tea, and the sound of vintage hipster music that isn’t even trying to be cool. (I just wish they stayed open past 7 PM!)
In my current experience of the English language, “Why?” is increasingly used exclusively as a prefix for lament, dispute, or displeasure rather than as the start of a question born of humble curiosity.
I’m aware this may sound silly to a public audience, but a very aspirational nickname for myself occurred to me today while in the DiamondBack second-floor kitchenette: T.S. Lovejoy. The “T” stands for “thankful” and “thoughtful.” I want to be T.S. Lovejoy. (I am motivated by words. How much more motivating will I find an epithet?)
I’ve only ever heard linguistic relativity (the idea, called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis when I was in school, that language influences worldview and cognition) discussed with an eye on perceivables, such as colors and “snow.” (This may be a function of my non-erudition.) I’m told the hypothesis is still merely a hypothesis and very much in dispute.
But if you apply the hypothesis as a lens to help understand our grasp of abstractions, such as what we talk about and think about in ethics, then my study of forgiveness, the confusion surrounding it, and its supposed pitfalls suggests to me that a version of the hypothesis focused on definitions of words representing abstractions is indisputable: If you say forgiveness is required, it matters very much to your worldview and thinking—not to mention your moral performance—how you define forgiveness. Same with love.
As I recall, on the basis of a misinterpretation of Romans 4:17b (“calleth those things which be not as though they were”), Charismatics have been trumpeting fake news as a disciplined, God-mandated spiritual practice for decades. This makes them unusually comfortable with and skilled at newspeak and doublethink—about current events and moral performance both—as well as prone to interpreting everything they claim and hear as being of heavenly import.
This helps me understand part of our current national political scene.
Just finished reading: The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World (2024) by Christine Rosen. Its main idea is that it’s inadvisable to allow the ascendance of smartphones and similarly attention-sucking entertainment and communication technologies to extinguish the non-mediated experiences they often replace, all of which have benefits. The threatened experiences she covers are:
face-to-face communication,
working with your hands,
waiting, idleness, and boredom,
interpreting our emotions with our own senses,
expressing our emotions with our own bodies,
direct intake of pleasures (travel, art, sex, cooking, eating) instead of their simulacra or attendant digitalia (constant communication with one’s existing social network while traveling, repros, pornography, and cooking shows),
serendipity, and
a sense of place.
This is one of those reads that’s preaching to the choir. But I’m in that choir, and I like it. It prepares me to make my case with evidence. Here are some of my notes from her chapter on the value of face-to-face communication:
It’s demonstrably easier to lie and be lied to via communication that isn’t face to face. This helps explain our current political climate. Rosen claims that Hancock’s studies even shows that when liars use screen-mediated communication, they are more motivated to lie.
Face-to-face communication is also a demonstrably more reliable way to get a request fulfilled.
Frederickson claims that the more attuned to others you become, the healthier your literal heart.
“Looking someone in the eye is a subtle gesture of inclusiveness, a small but significant act of civil attention.”
Empathy development is stunted in the absence of face-to-face communication.
However, after the chapter on face-to-face communication, and especially after the chapter on working with your hands, the precise, evidentiary quality of the argumentation all but dissipates. Additionally, it became difficult for me to take her seriously after I read the following phrase: “the passage from the New Testament book of Ecclesiastes.”
So mostly, I wouldn’t recommend reading the book, but I do strongly recommend the overall idea.
Listen, Merriam-Webster: You descriptivists do good work. It’s important we have maps of the lay of our linguistic land as it lies. But don’t purport to explain to the world that prescriptivists are only interested in “‘correctness’ set forth in ‘rules’ that [we] imagine.” Just like poorly developed roads, a poorly designed language (as I concede every language is to some degree) sometimes leads to confusion, frustration, and hazards. To suggest prescriptivists are always wrong to do what they do is the equivalent of saying city planners are always wrong to do what they do.
Misdevelopment of the land has consequences. So it is with lexicons—especially when the words in question are of moral value. Consider “forgive.” If “forgive” is “actually used,” as you write, “by writers and speakers of the English language,” to include by definition reconciliation, forgetting, and anger abatement, which in some circles, although thankfully not quite in your dictionary, resentment being different from anger, it does, then descriptivism can be guilty of abetting the deformation of our moral vocabularies and thus the persistence of harm, including domestic abuse and white supremacy, because despite your protestation, people look to your publications as a guide.
We need people alerting us to semantic hazards and dead ends.
Forgiveness: An Alternative Account, which Ruth and I both got excited about roughly simultaneously and thus co-purchased (co-purchasing books—what a fun idea! an interpersonal nano-library…),
It was a pleasure today to select recordings from which to make custom ringtones for when Sullivan and Éa call me. (I’ve been using “Whistle Stop” from Disney’s Robin Hood for Carla for years.) Éa even advised me on my selection for her, suggesting the winner (the first twenty-nine seconds of “Mrs. Robinson” by Simon & Garfunkel. For Sullivan, I chose the first thirty seconds of Quincy Jones’ “Soul Bossa Nova,” signifying his easygoing demeanor and his prioritizing enjoyment.
In British English, collective nouns, such as “team” and “Microsoft,” often take plural verbs, as in “My team are headed for the championships” and “Microsoft charge me for cloud storage.” I wish we did it this way in America, at least for corporations and governments. That’s because using the singular here hides the personal agency at play in those corporations’ and governments’ decisions and policies, and therefore the credit or guilt people deserve. I dislike it for the same reason I dislike non-poetic metonymy.
A workaround in American English is to use something like “the folks at Google” or “the members of the Trump administration.”