A Strange Character
November 8, 2007 at 1:17 am | In faith, theology | Leave a Comment“Why did Jesus of Nazareth do the things he did? What was happening to the world when he sat down to eat with a sinner or gave himself over to the cross? Christian theology ruminates over such questions because they are so richly and imponderably mysterious. The theologian who explores the full reality of Jesus Christ is journeying through strange country.”
Mark McIntosh, Christology from Within: Spirituality and the Incarnation in Hans Urs von Balthasar (U. of Notre Dame Press, 2000).
And here’s a fine essay on von Balthasar: http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2005/jcihak_hubapol_may05.asp
Drafts Y & Z
November 8, 2007 at 1:16 am | In Writing, life | Leave a CommentI have recently divided one novel into two. The first I have handed off to my daughter for now, as raw material for a class she’s taking in screenwriting at the New School in NYC. That story (boy having a psychotic break escapes from his psych ward and ends up on a freeway bridge in downtown L.A. with an important message he is hoping will be captured by TV cameras and broadcast to the world before it is too late) is inherently more cinematic than the second part, involving a different set of characters. That part begins like this:
“She continues to hope that her younger brother, Ted, is still alive. Her best-case scenario has him a cloistered monk in a cliffside cell somewhere. It’s a romantic notion but not inconceivable—Ted in secrecy and solitude, pouring out his life in prayer for the world. He would be happy doing that. As a little boy he’d wanted to be an architect, and maybe he ended up a builder after all, but a different sort: one who has traded rebar and I-beams for the inner geometry of the Kingdom of God. Its own forces and vectors, its many mansions.
“The overwhelming likelihood, however, is that his bones lie somewhere between the western border of Cambodia and Phnom Penh, buried or not. She imagines a team of archaeologists coming upon a pile of skeletons in a mass grave a hundred years from now, five hundred—and Ted’s remains somehow standing out. He had soft tooth enamel and a mouthful of silver, the one thing that might distinguish him from the Cambodians with whom he fell. Or someone, against all odds, might note a truncated left pinky finger and wonder what had happened to make it so.”
NRSV and holy “flame wars”
October 30, 2007 at 12:58 pm | In faith | Leave a CommentI am not a fanatic about inclusive language, but one of the things I appreciate about the NRSV is its sensible use of “brothers and sisters” when both genders are meant (it does not change pronouns for deity). Few things can stir up a flame war in the evangelical blogosphere quicker than disagreements about the relative merits of translations of the Bible. I’m weary of the argument that there’s no problem with the generic use of “he,” “man” and “brothers” because these also—of course—automatically reference women. They once did, but in the vernacular no longer do, and there’s no use saying this is not the case, because saying it doesn’t make it so. The vernacular is where we live. The vernacular—how words are actually, not ideally, used and perceived by people—is a primary concern of Bible translation.
There would be something jarring nowadays, for example, about a child-rearing manual that referred to the child only as “he.” It would not have been jarring thirty years ago. Language changes gradually with usage, and prescriptive rules shift gradually to account for usage. This is not a political statement; it’s just the way things work in the real world. I learned this in grad school, by the way, and want to say here that it’s entirely possible to be a descriptivist about language without being a relativist in your theology. I would wager that, in time, “they” (and “them” and “their”) may well become grammatically acceptable gender-neutral singular pronouns in written English. We already use these quite commonly in our speech: “Go up to the front of the store and look for a clerk and I’m sure they can help you.”
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