language on Conversation

The living human community that language creates involves living human bodies. We need to talk together, speaker and hearer here, now. We know that. We feel it. We feel the absence of it. Speech conne...

One development of the exile was an additional language for the Jewish people. The Babylonians and Persians spoke Aramaic, and out of necessity the Jews learned it. Some even became more conversant in...

Language is not speech, it is a full circle from word to sound to perception to understanding to feeling, to memorizing, to acting and back to the word about the act thus achieved. And before the list...

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.

One of the fastest ways to learn a language is by immersion . This term can mean a few different things, but the basic idea in all of them is that you are exposed to that language in your social inte...

To frame is to put a language boundary around our experience. It is to name what happens in particular ways, to say how we see the world, and to see the world how we say it is. Framing includes tellin...

Language is primarily a means of revelation, both for God and for us. Using words, God reveals himself to us. Using words, we reveal ourselves to God and to one another. By means of language, the enti...

War is what happens when language fails.

Summary of the Text Ancient Context What’s the historical context? The Tower of Babel The story of the Tower of Babel comes after many chapters relating the story of Noah, the flood, and the ...

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.

Ancient Context What’s the historical context? The Tower of Babel The story of the Tower of Babel comes after many chapters relating the story of Noah, the flood, and the covenant with Noah and...

Jesus is understood in the light of the assumptions which control our culture.  When “reason” is invoked as a parallel or supplementary authority to “Scripture” and “tradition,” what is happening is t...

Writing to his parents while imprisoned on the day of Pentecost, the German Dietrich Bonhoeffer said this: At the tower of Babel all the tongues were confounded, and as a result men could no longe...

One of the most critically acclaimed fantasy films in recent years was a piece of science fiction called Arrival . It is the story of beings from outer space who arrive on earth, igniting a wildfire ...

As a language-user, I’m bound to all the audacious capacities and frustrating limits of words. We label, we name, we frame all of our experiences, past, present, and future. We give words to our inner...

Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.

Clothed with Power I have a daughter who cannot acquire enough clothes. Every birthday, Christmas, or special occasion is an opportunity to shop online for something new. Fashionable rags give her a ...

One of [Lamin] Sanneh's key arguments is that while the spread of Islam has drawn ever-increasing numbers to the globalizing influence of Arabic, the spread of Christianity binds ever-increasing n...

Preaching Commentary Clothed with Power I have a daughter who cannot acquire enough clothes. Every birthday, Christmas, or special occasion is an opportunity to shop online for something new. Fashi...

Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.

Any fool can write learned language. The vernacular is the real test. If you can't turn your faith into it, then you either don't understand it or you don't believe it.

Language is the realm of the poet, of desire and hope, of the search for and expression of infinity.

The limits of my language means the limits of my world.

It is well known that Pentecost reverses Babel. The people who built the tower of Babel sought to make a name, and a unity, for themselves. At Pentecost, God builds his temple, uniting people in Chris...

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.

Rather than translating the culture, then, we need to try to enter the culture. When people want to study the Bible seriously, one of the steps they take is to learn the language. As I teach language ...

Why worship in our native language? Well, for one thing, it can keep people from distorting the Christian faith into a superstition: In one stream of church history, this can help explain worshipi...

Some people may wonder: why was the light of God given in the form of language? How is it conceivable that the divine should be contained in such brittle vessels as consonants and vowels? This questio...

Across all barriers of land and language, wealth and poverty, knowledge and ignorance, we are one, created from the same dust, subject to the same laws, and destined for the same end. With this compas...