[This post is part of a series that looks at religion and faith using concepts and tools gained from linguistics. Part I of the series is available here.] No two people share the same way of talking. Even within the same family, our pronunciations vary a little, we have different vocabularies, and prefer certain sentence … Continue reading Languages and Dialects of Faith
As I was writing my post for the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels the other day, I was struck by something in the text from the Apocalypse that had slipped past my notice in previous readings. In the dense symbolic language of its genre, the text describes a battle between warring factions in … Continue reading “I Saw Satan Fall like Lightning” (Further thoughts on Revelation 12.7-12)
If there’s one thing we’re learning as a culture it’s that the world is a far more complicated place than we’ve understood it to be. A simple world is one we can get our heads around, a world of obvious binaries of right and wrong, heroes and villains, male and female, animate and inanimate, even … Continue reading Beyond the Veil (A Reflection on the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels)
I'm a big architecture nerd. I love the grandeur of great buildings and how their styles can teach us something about goodness, truth, and beauty: from the expansive, encompassing rounded arches and domes of Byzantine basilicas that give us the sense of being embraced by the cosmos; to Gothic Cathedrals, whose long vertical lines and … Continue reading My Body is a Temple
Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised in the city of our God. So begins Psalm 48, a stirring hymn of praise to God — not the distant God of the philosophers or even the cosmic God of the theologians, but the God who dwelled right there, with and among God’s people. As … Continue reading The City of our God (A reflection on Ps 48)
Matthew Root 