Christian Feminists Boycott Websites

With a headline like that I knew I’d draw you in! Go read the article.

“Let’s Get It Through Their Thick Skulls,” ha ha! I’m so dense it took me twice before I got the joke. I should probably read more slowly…

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For another interesting and humorous quote on the same website, the author quotes a Teaching Company educational audio series:

“Music, like any pseudoscience, requires an adjectival palette by which we can isolate events that without proper terms we might not even be able to notice. It’s an interesting question to what degree language allows us to perceive things that are not language-associated. I’m a strong believer that if you’ve got the right word to identify something, you can perceive it. I think my favorite pseudoscience when it comes to this kind of thing is wine-tasting, where one has to come up with an adjectival palette that is almost a cartoon unto itself. But silly as these phrases may be—‘Oh, this has a hint of young tobacco, and old oak fragrant with raspberries’—silly as these terms are, they allow us to draw distinctions without which we may not be able to draw at all. So we will create a useful vocabulary.”

The blogger comments:

“Sometimes we don’t even know that we’re hearing, seeing, or tasting something until we have a name for it. I can see how that might apply to many areas of study and life.”

How does language affect how we understand something? I used to believe that ideas were independent of language, but now I’m not so sure. Words seem to be more real than I had thought. Rather than being mere symbols, they possess and impart the characteristics of what they say. Without certain vocabulary, it is impossible to think certain thoughts.

Maybe languages form cultures as much as culture affects language.

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Mark Noll recently published a book entitled, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. I want to read it. Here’s part of the publisher’s blurb:

Protestants and Catholics in Europe and Canada saw clearly that no matter how much the voluntary reliance on scriptural authority had contributed to the construction of national civilization, if there were no higher religious authority than personal interpretation regarding an issue as contentious as slavery, the resulting public deadlock would amount to a full-blown theological crisis.

This should be an interesting response to those who tend to frame the War Between the States in humanistic or political terms (i.e., human rights vs. states’ rights), which is actually how I have tended to see it up ’til now.

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Well, there’s nothing else interesting on the Web today. The Senate unfortunately shot down President Bush’s immigration bill, so I’m disappointed about that. From what I can gather, Republicans and Democrats were in opposition to various different parts of the bill. Too bad, because it seems like the most sensible (and least expensive) immigration policy for today.Of course, I don’t usually feel the need to provide a compelling economic or political argument for my positions, because they’re usually assumed on moral grounds–and I’m not a statesman, not at this point in my life anyway, so I don’t have to think about constituents…