language on Motives

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 ...

In her book Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home , Jen Pollock Michel reflects on the nature of home in a transient age. In this short excerpt, Michel focuses on the language associate...

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...

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...

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

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 ...

Imagine a remote village in Africa. No modern Westerner has ever set foot there. The natives live off the land, using the same ancient methods and tools as their forefathers used for the last thousand...

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too. Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally,...

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 ...

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...

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...

Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.

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...

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

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...

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...

Years ago, the story goes, a San Diego bank hired a private investigator to track down a bank robber and retrieve stolen funds. The search led to Mexico. The investigator crossed the border and then, ...

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

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...

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

Recently I (Stu) was watching a lecture on Old English (yes, the nerd levels are extremely high here), which looks almost nothing like the English we speak today. It is essentially the result of Germa...

The Christian gospel is rooted in language: God spoke a creation into being; our Savior was the Word made flesh. The poet is the person who uses words not primarily to convey information but to make a...

My favorite scene in the 1987 movie Broadcast News is the moment when young Aaron, who has just graduated as valedictorian of his high school class, is attacked in the schoolyard after the ceremonies ...

How many of you have ever been told that women talk more than men? How many of you have heard this statistic, on average women use 20,000 words a day to men’s 7,000? I know I’ve heard this quote in se...

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...

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 ...

The eyes have one language everywhere.

God is gracious beyond the power of language to describe.