language on Patience

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 ...

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...

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...

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 ...

God is gracious beyond the power of language to describe.

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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

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 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...

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

Pastor: In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. People: Amen. Pastor: With all the host of heaven, from every nation, in every language, we cry out: People:...

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...

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

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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, ...

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

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...

Jesus was God spelling himself out in language humanity could understand.

Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.

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...

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...

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...

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 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...