From the Inbox 21 September 2007

A small matter, in both senses: Hyphens fall victim to the email [sic] society, from the Daily Telegraph, announcing that the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary "has knocked the hyphens out of 16,000 words."

Also from the DT, Sex and the internet used to promote Israel, in which the deputy director general of the Israeli foreign ministry says the group with the most negative views of Israel is "the cohort of young men, aged from 18 to 35, so we took advice on how best to get a positive message across to them and the answer was by using sexy images."

From the English Catholic magazine The Tablet, Alex Kirby's Green prayers for a beautiful world, about the Patriarch of Constantinople's latest interfaith meeting on the environment.  It included an amusing typo in the second paragraph: "t was the place chosen for the service celebrated by the Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew I, titular leader of 250 Orthodox Christians" (they get it right several paragraphs later).

In his opening address to this year's symposium, the patriarch himself verged on the apocalyptic. He began with a warning that "the danger of an avoidable environmental catastrophe is now more acute than ever". All was not yet lost, he said: "Neither our scientific friends nor our fellow leaders of the world of faith would have come to Greenland if we thought the future of the planet was utterly hopeless."

But his conclusion was stark: "Senior figures from many religious traditions have offered up, each in his own way, a silent prayer for the future of our beautiful world, for the people who live on Earth now, and for the generations that will succeed us, assuming that human folly does not destroy life on earth altogether."

Also from The Tablet,  a review of the Catholic philosopher and Templeton Prize winner Charles Taylor's latest book A Secular Age. The theologian Fergus Kerr writes that

Taylor wants to lay out what it takes to go on believing in God, in the absence of any equivalent to the intellectual, cultural and imaginative surroundings in which pre-modern religion was quietly embedded. This is what he calls our "social imaginary": how we collectively sense what is normal and appropriate in our dealings with one another and with the world around us. This is something deeper and more diffused than philosophical theories or thought-out positions.

From the Wall Street Journal, a short article on Finding room for conservatives in interfaith dialogues.

From Salon.com, The Mormons are coming, by Andrew Hehir, a review of the Mormon historian Terryl Givens' People of Paradox. Among other interesting ideas in the review:

In his introduction, Givens speculates that Mormonism is on the path toward becoming "the first new world faith since Islam." That may be premature, since the global ratio of Muslims to Mormons is roughly 115 to 1. Still, the longer you consider the parallels between these two faiths, the more provocative they become, which I'm pretty sure was not Givens' intention. Most obviously, both religions involve divine revelations directly communicated to a charismatic latter-day prophet, who rapidly attracts followers but is widely viewed by outsiders as a huckster, a fake or even a madman.

To their respective followers, Mohammed and Joseph Smith are not the inventors of new denominations but restorers of the original, uncorrupted monotheistic tradition of Abraham, Moses and Jesus. Even the language of the two faiths' central tenets is strikingly similar. In reciting the Shahadah, or principal declaration of faith, Muslims may say: "There is no god but Allah and Mohammed is His Messenger," or "I testify that Mohammed is the Messenger of God." One of the most frequent forms of "testimony" in a Mormon meetinghouse comes when a worshiper rises to declare: "I know that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God."

From the Times Literary Supplement, Ryszard Kapuscinski: enemy of provincialism, a review by Edith Hall of his Travels with Herodotus.

And finally, something sent to me by a regular reader of Mere Comments: Zipskinny, which gives you various demographic information for every zip code in the country. The value of the information is limited, for all sorts of reasons (e.g., one zip code may cover two very different communities, so that the average for the area tells you little about either), but you may enjoy it.

Comments

[Ethan C.]

The Salon article on Mormonism isn't displaying right for me now, but I will say that the parallels between Mormonism and Islam are a little uncanny. I'd never thought about it before, but various things from the narrative of their sciptural revelation to the phenomenon of polygamy is similar. Of course, the differences are vast as well, and their cosmology and view of God are practically opposites, but the places in which they are similar in specific details are odd.

Does anyone else have an opinion of why this might be?

[Nick]

Need to radically alter scripture in order to support current beliefs. Both Mormonism and Islam assume that the OT/NT is somehow corrupt and in need of new revelation. Current revelation therefore has to be "stronger" in some way.

BTW....a couple articles down Dr. Strange and Mr. Norell gets mentioned. I highly recommend the book. Its a good read.

[Yaknyeti]

Regarding the WSJ article:
"The more conservative religious folks were not interested in talking about spirituality, peace-building and social justice."

I don't like this statement, but I'm not quite sure why. Is it that we "conservative religious folks" like those topics, but consider other concepts more important and fundamental? Is it a gut reaction from guessing that these words aren't used in the same way in which I approve of them? Or is it simply the effect of disagreeing with a culture that immerses me in its approval of them?

Or maybe I'm just a bad conservative...

[Bill R]

"A small matter, in both senses: Hyphens fall victim to the email [sic] society, from the Daily Telegraph, announcing that the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary "has knocked the hyphens out of 16,000 words." "

One place from which the hyphen will never disappear is hyphenated names. For the Brits in particular, the hyphen ("Smythe-Jones") is a subtle intimation of aristocracy.

[Ethan C.]

>>BTW....a couple articles down Dr. Strange and Mr. Norell gets mentioned. I highly recommend the book. It's a good read.<<

I recommend it too. Fine stuff!

[Fr. Robert Hart]

A very obvious similarity is that Galatians 1:8 applies very directly to the claims of both Islam and Mormonism

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>The Salon article on Mormonism isn't displaying right for me now, but I will say that the parallels between Mormonism and Islam are a little uncanny.<<<

That's because the resemblance between Mohammed and Joseph Smith is more than a little uncanny. Both designed religions that both pandered to man's baser instincts, subordinated women, and ensured that the charismatic founder would reap the benfits of his divinely revealed prophesy.

[Judy Warner]

Dittos to the Dr. Strange and Mr. Norrell book recommendation.

"The more conservative religious folks were not interested in talking about spirituality, peace-building and social justice."

"Social justice" as commonly used assumes a view of the world that is horrifying to conservatives. It usually means using government to right those things that the left considers wrong, mainly inequality of any sort, within a society and between societies. In Judaism you hear of "Tikkun Olam" -- the perfection of the world, much used by radicals like Michael Lerner, who named his magazine "Tikkun." It originally meant perfection under God's sovereignty as the one Lord came to be recognized and false Gods abandoned. Individual acts of charity and love would help this along, and that is why Jews have historically been so dedicated to charity. But among liberal Jews (most Jews, unfortunately) it has come to mean pretty much the same as social justice and the terms are used interchangeably.

[Andy]

A standard critique of Mormonism in its earliest stages was that it represented an "American Mohammedanism". The observation in Salon is apt, but about 170 years late.

[James Kabala]

It's interesting that the examples given by the Telegraph are words from which the hyphen disappeared long ago in American English. I guess the British (until now) were more attached to their hyphens.

[Gina]

Does anyone else have an opinion of why this might be?

Satan recycling a successful move from his playbook?

[Neil Gussman]

Satanic recycling makes sense. Speaking of Satan, I was wondering if it was the Moral Majority or Christians in politics in general that brought the Mormons so fully into the mainstream of American life. After growing up nominally Jewish in Boston, I became a believer in Utah. The pastor of the first Church I attend considered himself primarily a missionary to the Mormons. Almost as fast as I got a Scofield Bible, I got a copy of the "The Kingdom of the Cults." Walter Martin had no doubt that the blond, blue-eyed kids on my block were growing up victims of a Satanic lie. But now, because Mormons agree with conservatives on cultural issues, it is unfashionable to refer to Mormons as heretics. I keep extra copies of the Divine Comedy that I find at yard sales for the days when Mormon missionaries. I give them each a copy and say there have been real believers on Earth from the time Our Lord walked here until this moment. Christianity did not need to be raised from the dead in 1831.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>But now, because Mormons agree with conservatives on cultural issues, it is unfashionable to refer to Mormons as heretics. <<<

Not on my block. And remember, we Eastern Catholics are an integral element of the religious right, thanks to our cooption by Paul Weyrich.

[Neil Gussman]

Stuart,
Well then you live on a good block.
Neil

[David Williams]

It is not only hyphens that are falling victim to the email society. English English is also suffering with American English and American spelling insidiously creeping into the English language due to dominance of films and television, and use of incorrect spell checkers. And it is not just spelling. Words are starting to have different meanings, for instance "guess" supplanting the quite different word "suppose". Other words like "billion" and "trillion" have more officially changed their meaning, the UK adopting the American definition instead of the traditional British meaning.
Argument as to which English is better seems fruitless, both forms still contain massive irregularities and inconsistencies. If we see value as Christians in have a global language of communication of ideals and ideas - increasingly English rather than Esperanto - there seems to be growing merit in adopting a simpler form of "New English" - eliminating the irregularities in pronunciation, the archaic spelling and the silent letters would make it much quicker and easier to learn and understand worldwide as a second language, essential in the age of great mobility.It would also better open up the route to rapid voice recognition of speech by computers and talk back to us by computers.
English today bears no resemblance to the language of Chaucers day - it has changed out of all recognition. It needs to change again but in a radical way acknowledging the IT and globalised age we live in.

[Will S.]

> Both designed religions that both pandered to man's baser instincts, subordinated women, and ensured that the charismatic founder would reap the benfits of his divinely revealed prophesy.

And both, whilst pandering indeed to man's baser instincts as regards sexual matters, endeavoured to compensate by introducing a pietistic, abstensionist position on alcoholic beverages.