o1mnikent

The center of global Christianity is moving south to places like Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. That’s not news to anyone who’s read Philip Jenkins or heard him speak on the topic.

And Christians in North America have been reminded so often now that instead of sending missionaries to Africa (you know, that culturally homogenous land of heathens), they’re now sending missionaries to North America.

But that’s not as simple as it sounds. From yesterday’s NY Times:

Father Oneko, 46, had never counseled parishioners like those he found here at St. Michael the Archangel Catholic Church. Many are active-duty or retired military families coping with debt, racial prejudice, multiple deployments to war zones and post-traumatic stress disorder. Nor did he have any idea how to lead the multimillion-dollar fund-raising campaign the parishioners had embarked on, hoping to build an octagonal church with a steeple to replace their red brick parish hall.

Cutting his sermons short was, in some ways, the least of Father Oneko’s worries when he arrived here in 2004. He did not understand the African-American experience. He had never dealt with lay people so involved in running their church. And yet, in the end, the families of his church would come to feel an affinity with their gentle new pastor, reaching out to him in his hour of need, just as he had tended to them in theirs.

Prescriptivists make up meaningless rules about language, like don’t split your infinitives (“to boldly go where no one has gone before”), and other and baseless usage rules.

Jan Freeman explains why you can’t be both a language prescriptivist and a historian.

From the Boston Globe:

…I often turn to usage history to help put current complaints in perspective. There’s a wealth of material: During the past couple of centuries, when prescriptivism really got rolling, there was an English-language authority ready to pronounce on almost any usage point, no matter how small.

Some of my favorite examples:

Laundry. “Meaning a place where clothing is washed, this word cannot mean, also, clothing sent there to be washed.” (Ambrose Bierce, “Write it Right,” 1909)

Girl for daughter. “A father, on being requested by a rich and vulgar fellow for permission to marry ‘one of his girls,’ gave this rather crushing reply: ‘Certainly. Which one would you prefer – the waitress or the cook?’ ” (C.W. Bardeen, “Verbal Pitfalls,” 1883)

Sleuth “denotes the track of a living creature, in particular the track of a wild animal. . . . In a semi-humorous way the newspapers commonly mention a detective as a sleuth; their readers, not thinking of the humor, take sleuth to be a regular synonym of detective. The only meaning the word has in sober English is track or footprint.” (Joseph Fitzgerald, “Word and Phrase: True and False Usage in English,”1901)

[ht: Jimmy McCarty and CICW]

From CCEL:

Let folly praise that, what fancy loves, I praise and love that Child
Whose heart no thought, Whose tongue no word, Whose hand no deed defiled.
I praise Him most, I love Him best, all praise and love is His;
While Him I love, in Him I live, and cannot live amiss.
Love’s sweetest mark, laud’s highest theme, man’s most desired light,
To love Him life, to leave Him death, to live in Him delight.
He mine by gift, I His by debt, thus each to other due,
First friend He was, best friend He is, all times will try Him true.
Though young, yet wise, though small, yet strong; though man, yet GOD He is;
As wise He knows, as strong He can, as GOD He loves to bliss.
His knowledge rules, His strength defends, His love doth cherish all;
His birth our joy, His life our light, His death our end of thrall.
Alas! He weeps, He sighs, He pants, yet do His angels sing;
Out of His tears, His sighs and throbs, doth bud a joyful spring.
Almighty Babe, Whose tender arms can force all foes to fly,
Correct my faults, protect my life, direct me when I die!

—Francis Turner Palgrave, Treasury of Sacred Song

[ht: CICW]

Shelly and I have been reading The Chronicles of Nania aloud to each other for the past few weeks, so it was with interest that I read a review of Laura Miller’s The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventure in Narnia.

From the NY Times:

“If the Chronicles had worked according to Lewis’s plans,” Miller writes, “and in the way many of his Christian admirers believe them to, I would have reassessed my attitude toward my religion. I would have realized that Narnia and Aslan represented another face of Christianity, a better one than the Church had ever shown me, and that in turn would lead me back to the faith. ‘This was the reason you were brought to Narnia,’ Aslan explains to Edmund and Lucy . . . in a scene whose heavy-handed imagery (a lamb, a meal of fish) had gone utterly over my head, ‘that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.’ ”

Miller goes on: “Can a book win over a soul who is fundamentally disinclined to believe? If any books could have persuaded me, it would have been these, yet I didn’t budge.” Miller defines herself as a soul instead of a child, a reader. I can’t help wondering: Could it be that a reader can grow a sense of a soul by reading, even if one rejects the religious aspect of such a fanciful figure as a soul? [...]

“The author who can make a world for a reader — make him believe that the people, places and events he describes are, if anything, truer than his real immediate surroundings — that author is someone with a mighty power indeed. Who can forget the first time they experienced this sensation? Who can doubt that every literary encounter they have afterward must somehow be colored by it?

Usually we only hear about the Ten Commandments as they relate to whether or not they may be displayed in such-and-such a courthouse, or recited in a state-funded school, and the like, which is why I always enjoy encountering more charitable assessments.  (Chris Hedges’ memoir based on the commandments, for example, is excellent.)

I enjoyed the following piece by David Bodanis, in which he examines the ten commandments as the socio-political statement of formerly-enslaved refugees (with a few digs at Christopher Hitchens as a bonus). Some of the historical details are a little murky, and his conclusions about texts aren’t exactly conclusive, but the rest is pretty good.

From Prospect:

…The point should be clear: the fire and brimstone can be avoided simply by sticking to the commandments themselves. Their consistent message is not one of repression, but of freedom: freedom from fear of your possessions being taken; freedom from relentless work; freedom from chaos. Refugees today would seek little more. 

Einstein once said that he felt the truths of the universe were like a series of thick, closed volumes waiting in a dimly-lit library. Very occasionally one of us is allowed to step forward, lift one of the age-old books, and get a glimpse of what was written on just a single page. Very little has crossed the dust of 30 centuries to shape us today. The ten commandments have.

How to tell you’re in a recession…

[ht: Andrew Sullivan]

From a comment on Alan Jacobs’ blog:

…I don’t think the contemporary world is so furiously enamored with the written word that we can regard an innovative way to access it as a suspicious luxury rather than an urgent necessity.

Publishers and book reviewers have been lamenting the death of books for years now.

Perhaps, as this commentor suggests, new media by itself (like the Kindle, Google books, and other forms of electronic reading) won’t solve the problem, only delay its inevitable consequence.

I just imported my feed from my other blog—o1mnikent.tumblr.com—where I’ve been posting for the past year or so. Many of these posts are links to articles, pictures, video, and other content I find while trawling the web.

Pardon some of the posts that didn’t import properly.

Calvin 500

Read the Institutes in a year.

All the cool kids are doing it.

[ht: Meg]