Language gaps

Posted on by albrooke

Pastoral Prayer 05/31/2026

I wonder whether you come across online slang words and nervously look them up to find out what they mean. “mog,” “merk,” “looksmaxxing.” Priscilla and I were disagreeing the other day about whether “tradwife” is always disparaging.

Language is always changing, and one of the hardest things as we grow older is to keep up with the language. American English just slowly changes out from under us, and in 30 years things can become very different. This can happen in the church and it can happen when the church speaks to the world.

The changes are sometimes the way a group differentiates itself, and it is, in fact, kind of ridiculous for outsiders to use the slang when they are not part of the group.

Or new words may be a way of expressing ideas that don’t fit in the old vocabulary. Though God’s truth does not change, what seems critical and how it is explained does change.

When I was a young Christian in say 1973, I recall two tracts, one called “Jesus didn’t have long hair” (Whaaat?) and one titled “Mary didn’t wear pants” (Okaaaay). I guess the first one was a reaction to the ’60s and I don’t know the second was a reaction to . . . the ’40s?

I don’t think those tracts are particularly relevant today. Maybe the issues are still important – we still discuss gender roles – but those tracts no longer communicate a serious message to most people. The writers were speaking a different language to a different world.

Frederick Buechner used to say that the preacher – the person charged with the responsibility of communicating God’s truth – can’t just speak the old language loudly, distinctly and slowly:

Unfortunately, the only language people really understand is their own language, and unless preachers are prepared to translate the ancient [truths] into it, they might as well save their breath.

I think that’s right.

Really, sometimes it is hard to want to learn a new language, a new culture, a new way of translating the old truths into words that people who aren’t already on the inside can comprehend. It is hard to care like Jesus cared.

As a child of the ’70s, I need to learn a new language don’t I? Only then will I be able to speak the ancient truths to those who only speak “2026.” But that’s okay, I belong to a God who delights to have his children speak in tongues that can be understood by those on the outside. Think of Pentecost.

Let’s pray about that, today.

You have shown us your truth in your Word and you have shown us grace in the Cross and you have charged us with the responsibility of speaking your unchanging truth to our quickly-changing world.

Lord, I don’t always love people enough to want to learn their language. I am exhausted from the need to learn the new syntax, the new vocabulary, the new grammar. There are probably others like me here.

We ask that you teach us to love the world enough to learn new languages.

Amen.

Out of class

Posted on by albrooke

Most Americans are proud of not being class conscious like we think the British are.

David Brooks, ever perceptive, ever irenic, warns about the dangers of (largely) voluntary class segregation, noting that in the United States we tend to stay in our own groups:

  • Last year a group of researchers published a study in the journal Nature in which they surveyed leaders in 30 fields, including law, media, politics and so on. They found that not only had nearly all of society’s power brokers gone to college, 54 percent of them went to the same 34 elite schools. That’s segregation on steroids. . . . In his 2019 book, “The Meritocracy Trap,” Daniel Markovits writes that the academic gap between the affluent and less affluent is greater today than the achievement gap between white Americans and Black Americans in the final days of Jim Crow. I’d like to let that sink in. Nearly all of us were raised on the conviction that Jim Crow was rancid. We’ve effectively recreated it on class lines.

David Brooks, “America’s New Segregation” The New York Times (Aug. 14, 2025) [link].

I think there are at least three places where the “classes” still mix — churches,* ballparks,** and concert venues. If you live and work in one setting, maybe your best bet to get out of your group is to listen to music with a crowd, cheer on your team, or worship God.

Not a bad way to do your civic duty.

*Also synagogues and mosques, but I didn’t want to write the insufferably bland “houses of worship.” **Yeah, yeah, arenas, stadiums, pitches, too.

Juxtaposition

Posted on by albrooke

Having just finished Doris Kearns Goodwin’s masterful An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s (2024), I came across an article by Lisa Russ Spaar. “Maximalisma,” The American Scholar (May 16, 2025) [link].

Start with the book. The late Dick Goodwin and Doris Kearns Goodwin were each important people in the lives of JFK, LBJ and RFK before they married. They were Zelig-like in their ability to be in the background of truly important events. The premise/impetus for the book was that Dick Goodwin saved everything from drafts of presidential speeches to the shattered nightstick he picked up in a Chicago hotel (after Eugene McCarthy talked the police out of punishing the college students they had incorrectly thought had pelted them with debris). He kept every kind of paper and memento in 100s of banker’s boxes. With the Goodwins’ recollections of events and DKG’s historical research, they went box-by-box through the Sixties. After his death in 2018, DKG wrote this amazing book about the time, their times, and their day-by-day journey through the boxes. This book was wonderful.

Then today Austin Kleon Alan Jacobs Lore Wilbert Sarah Rowell Nate Silver Neil Paine Joe Posnanski Andrew Sullivan Robin Sloan, no, Cherie Harder [link] sent out a link to the article. It was an excellent insight in to the mind and attic of the person who saves just a little too much. Spaar says:

  • I have to admit, at 68, that all of these “things” comfort and inspire me no less than my college dorm room décor helped me, 50 years ago, feel like the person I wanted to be. At the same time, however—perhaps because I’m closer to Erikson’s stage eight now—I do worry about those who will have to make their way through all of this meaningful-to-me matter if I don’t do it first. It’s not so much that I don’t want my grown children (or worse, my grandchildren) to come upon that small batch of youthful Polaroids (where are they?). Or to plumb the histrionic depths of my teenage journals. Or to dig out, with disbelief, that long-unused bit of lingerie from the bottom of a drawer. It’s that I feel a responsibility, after a lifetime of gathering, to cull those personal treasures.

Or, hey, maybe she should write a book! Yes, THAT’s why I am saving all this stuff!

Then

Posted on by albrooke

From Joe Poz (Joe Posnanski, “Chasing 3,000 Ks,” Joe Blogs (May 19, 2025) [link]):

  • When I was a kid, the big ballpark promotion was Bat Day. There were other cool giveaways — ball day, jacket day, cap day, T-shirt day, I think we did all of them because my father has always believed in getting value for his dollar — but bat day was the big one. I mean, they really used to give full-size (well, Little League-size) baseball bats to thousands and thousands of people. Were we a better society then? I mean, that obvious answer is: No. We were definitely NOT a better society then — for about 10,000 reasons. But it was a time when they could give bats to, say, 10,000 or 20,000 people and be confident that people would not use them to beat each other. That’s something.

Yeah, actually it is something.

Read, Feel, Think

Posted on by albrooke

Three great reads:

A very well-written piece on the value of (well-written) children’s literature by Lindsey Cornett, “The Gospel According to Charlotte’s Web” The Conversational Life (May 9, 2025) [link].

I particularly like:

  • But I love Charlotte’s Web most of all because it paints such a beautiful picture of the kingdom of God. When children’s literature is discussed in Christian circles, books like The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe often dominate the conversation, perhaps because we know so much about the faith of the author. I don’t know if E.B. White was a person of faith, but I do know that Charlotte’s Web portrays a counter-cultural way of living and honoring one another, of making our world more whole. On Zuckerman’s farm, it is the despised, the lowly, the feared—the rat, the pig, the spider—who are best able to see each creature for the gift they are and to create a home where all are seen and cared for. 

You will probably come out of this with a list of books to reread that you haven’t picked up in some time (or ever).

The great sportswriter, Joe Posnanski (joeblogs.com), is so prolific he cannot “stay in his lane.”

It is often quite magical when he veers off into other topics. This week he and his wife have a daughter graduating from college. His stories about taking Elizabeth to Harry Potter World (“Katie the Prefect” [link]) or taking her to Hamilton (“The Story of Tonight” [link]) will make you mist up. Today’s offering was about taking her to see Bruce Springsteen (“No Retreat, Baby” [link]). (If you don’t care for the sports, just scroll down.)

The baseball writing is pretty great, too (even though Joe is no fan of the Yankees).

Here’s something that will make you think! Mary Harrington, “The Female Gaze” Reactionary Feminist (May 2, 2025) [link]. (Don’t worry, you don’t have to agree with everything — that’s the thinking part.)

Fascinating!

Posted on by albrooke

I had heard this story in short, but the people at Veritasium tell it brilliantly with interviews, archival film and graphics. The best 33 minutes you will waste on the web today. Check it out:

Want more information? Look out for Michael Greenburg, The Great Miscalculation: The Race to Save New York City’s Citicorp Tower (June 2025) [link]. Also, the original New Yorker article is available online: Joseph Morgenstern, The Fifty-Nine Story Crisis (May 21, 1995). [link] Wikipedia has an article, too: “Citicorp Center Engineering Crisis” [link].

Ruth and Esther?

Posted on by albrooke

One of my adult daughters is in a study that combines the books of Ruth and Esther, despite the fact that the two women who lend their names to the books lived about 600 years apart. The two short books share an important message:

Even when human circumstances are most bleak—famine, death, persecution—God does not for a moment fail to act in hidden ways to bring about what he has assured: first the line of a king he has chosen, and later the unlikely survival of his people in exile.

Dorothy Sayers

Posted on by albrooke

June 13, 1893 –December 17, 1957

  • Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man – there never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronised; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them either as “The women, God help us!” or “The ladies, God bless them!”; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unself-conscious. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything “funny” about woman’s nature.

Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human?

Election musings

Posted on by albrooke

Via Lore Ferguson Wilbert (sayable.com) [link], Henri J.M. Nouwen’s thoughts seem relevant:

  • “Hope is not dependent on peace in the land, justice in the world, and success in the business. Hope is willing to leave unanswered questions unanswered and unknown futures unknown. Hope makes you see God’s guiding hand not only in the gentle and pleasant moments but also in the shadows of disappointment and darkness. No one can truly say with certainty where he or she will be ten or twenty years from now. You do not know if you will be free or in captivity, if you will be honored or despised, if you will have many friends or few, if you will be liked or rejected. But when you hold lightly these dreams and fears, you can be open to receive every day as a new day and to live your life as a unique expression of God’s love for humankind. There is an old expression that says, “As long as there is life there is hope.” As Christians we also say, “As long as there is hope there is life.”

Via Alan Jacobs and The Hedgehog Review, Joan Didion’s words “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” might be applicable, but probably not the way we thought when first we read them:

  • That is, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live” because there is no story outside of our minds: “We live entirely . . . by the imposition of a narrative line on disparate images” (emphasis mine). Our endless telling of stories is, then, the product not of delight but of despair: of our inability to face the chaos of what is. If people knew the context of the sentence, they wouldn’t be putting it on T-shirts. Instead, they’d be driven to therapy, to alcohol, or to church.

Alan Jacobs, “Stories to Live By,” The Hedgehog Review (Nov. 4, 2024) [link].

But there is hope and God is still on his throne, though (like Job), we often aren’t aware of what is going on behind the scenes.