Eugene Peterson and Bono film on Psalms: cussing without cussing

Here is the new Fuller Studio film of Eugene and Bono on Psalms.
                      Links and quotes below


Gotta love so much about this film..like Eugene calling Rolling Stone Magazine "Rolling Stones"..
and a mosh pit a "mash pit." (;

If you like the hilarious story  (excerpted above) about how EP first turned Bono down, there's  a whole video of EP on that and more here.

 --
EP:

"At twelve years old , [the psalms] showed me that imagination was a way to get inside the truth.

  ....translating a psalm...To try to get them to realize that praying  wasn't being nice before God.. The psalms are not pretty; they're not nice...just pray this psalm..  It's not  smooth; it's not nice, it's  not pretty; but it's honest.  And I think we're trying for honesty..which is very, very hard in our culture.

We need to find a way to cuss...without cussing. And the imprecatory psalms surely do that.
 We've got to some way in context; and the context is the whole Bible; whole psalter...to tell people how mad we are.

...We have crosses in every room in this house.  But when I look at those, I don't think of decoration; I think 'This is the world we live in..and it's a world with a lot of crosses . '  And I would just like to spend my life in doing something about that through Scripture, through  preaching, through friendship.  My years are getting shorter, and I don't have many  left; but I don't want to escape the violence..."

Bono: 

"The only way we can approach God..if we're honest..is through metaphor; through symbol.  So art becomes essential; not decorative.

..The psalmist is brutally honest about the explosive joy that he's feeling and the deep sorrow or confusion, and it's that that sets the psalms apart for me.And I often think,
'Why isn't church music more like that'? ..

...I'm talking about dishonesty. I find in a lot of  Christian art ..a lot of dishonesty. I think it's a shame because these people are vulnerable to God (in a good way)...porous; open.. I would love if this conversation would inspire people who are writing these beautiful.., gospel songs:  write a song about their bad marriage; write a song  about how they're pissed off at the government. Because that's what God wants from you: the truth... The truth will set you free; it will blow things apart. Why I'm suspicious of Christians is because of this lack of realism..and I'd love to see more of that in art and life and music."

(answering "What is the work of the artist..in acknowledging the intensity; the reality of the feeling without indulging the feeling?").
Having feelings is perfectly normal. ...David danced naked in front of the troops; that's one reason I like him .. abandonment... very important... understanding our bodies as well as our minds and ourspirits.  The Three-Personed God --The Trinity--is reflected  in our body, mind and spirit..,We really  do ignore this.

--
EP  prays:

"Be with us as we continue our lives of serving You with poetry, with the arts, with psalm, finding ways to enter into what You're already doing:  not calculating the chances, but doing what's right there, what You've already started doing..."

Listen for the prophetic summary in the last two words of the film
 ...from Mrs. Peterson.

 --------------------------


See:

• Story of the film, along related quotes with resources 
• Behind the scenes

•  Bono audio: God at the 9" Nails Gig 

• atu2:"The Message Author Says U2's Message is Refreshing, Faithful, and Honest

 

So.. this habit of answering questions with 'So" as the first word is so interesting. So..

 So, it seems to have started becoming hugely popular around five years ago to start a conversation with "So.." as a discourse marker.  Not so much as in  the question "So?" ("So..do you want to go to the concert?")

                      ...but "so" as an answer or "conversation manager" or "interactional agenda."

One class I teach involves students showing and interpreting collages they have made.

I don't think five years ago any students started their explanations with "So..."   Now, almost all of them do, regardless of age.

SOoo.. whatsup with that?

 

Linguists aren’t alone in spotting the trend. Journalists have caught onto the discourse marker in the past few years, spurring articles about the tiny word and its growing use.
The movie “That Awkward Moment” also called attention to the “so” that starts sentences. Zac Efron’s character coins the moment when a girl tries to define a relationship as “The So…” as in, “So, what does our relationship mean to you?” For the characters, the discourse marker signals trouble. link

 

So, many are blaming Mark Zuckerburg.

(This all reminds me of a previously-discussed shift discussed here: thirty years ago, no one would call the songs sung at a Christian gathering "worship"  or "the worship time"...let alone that a "worship leader" meant the song leader.  See this and this)

The discussion about "so.." as the new norm/normal often focuses on the grammatical approprietness  and/or the thesis that is is lazy speech.

Several links below to help you decide.

Excerpt below from Do you use “so” to manage conversations?:

 

 

Researcher Galina Bolden studied recordings of conversations, looking at the difference between the sentence-initial oh and so. In a 2010 New York Times article Anand Giridharadas sums up insight Bolden supplied via email: “To begin a sentence with ‘oh,’…is to focus on what you have just remembered and your own concerns. To begin with ‘so,’…is to signal that one’s coming words are chosen for their relevance to the listener.” If words like so and oh were used to arbitrarily fill a pause, they wouldn’t take on such different functions from each other. Bolden suggests here that the sentence-initial so is a way for the speaker to subtly cue to the listener that the following information is relevant to the listener’s interests. Whether or not the information is actually relevant is for the listener to decide, though perhaps this cue makes it more likely for a conversational partner to pay attention. (If you want to learn more, Bolden’s research is also discussed in this Language Log post.)   link

Links:

• So This is Why Everyone Starts Sentences With “So ... - Slate

•  Use of word "so" undermines your credibility

•  Do you use "so" to manage conversations

• So,why is everyone saying “so?"

•  So… why is everyone saying “so?" | USA TODAY College

•  How A Popular Two-Letter Word Is Undermining Your Credibility

• 'That Awkward Moment' Stars Discuss 'The So…'

  • +Follow My Logic? A Connective Word Takes the Lead

  • +Urban Dictionary: The So... moment

   

• English marker

Kognitiv Lienguistix: some links on Sapir-Whorf and the Bible

•  this excerpt from From Orality to Orality: A New Paradigm for Contextual Translation of the Bible
•  Hebrew and Greek thought: Sapir-Whorf
• The Effect of Language upon Thinking by Michael Marlowe 
•  : Sapir-Whorf and Biblical Languages

"But religious people have been covering up obscene language in the Bible for years"

"What the Bleep Does the Bible Say About Profanity?

Political correctness, vulgarity and the scandalous nature of God's Word"

By Preston Sprinkle:

    One of my favorite and most uncomfortable memories as a Bible professor was when I had Old Testament scholar, Tremper Longman, give a guest lecture on the Song of Songs. Tremper specializes in ancient near Eastern love poetry. No, he’s not some creepy old guy who gets off on ancient erotic 

...  CONTINUED HERE

Wikipedia Won. Now Let's hack Church, too

link, by Jeremy Smith

The Beauty of Containment

Great post By Happy Lee on "untranslatable" Spanish and English words (Hmm, I wonder if some languages have no word for "untranslatable"..is "untranslatable" ever "untranslatable"):



 here 

avoid a clergyman like the plague

"Avoid it like the plague"?

The phrase finds its origin  in Saint Jerome ( 345-420 A.D.),  who quipped,

 "Avoid, as you would the plague,
                         a clergyman who is also a man of business,
                            and  rises from poverty to wealth,and from obscurity to a high position."
                                               -The Principal Works of St. Jerome

"Thinking in a Foreign Language Could Sway Your Moral Judgments"

Link:

Thinking in a Foreign Language Could Sway Your Moral Judgments

Holy Heteroclite's Hiraethean Homesickness ...with a bit of sehnsuch and duende

I love words/concepts for which other languages have no translation.....partly because all translation is betrayal  (a phrase which is itself translated)

Mike Peters taught me a new  
word the other night. 

In some of his delightful comments between songs, he introduced us to the concept of hiraeth:

Hiraeth /hɪəraɪ̯θ/ is a Welsh word that has no direct English translation. The University of Wales, Lampeter attempts to define it as homesickness tinged with grief or sadness over the lost or departed. It is a mix of longing, yearning, nostalgia, wistfulness, or an earnest desire^[1] for the Wales of the past.^[2]Hiraeth bears considerable similarities with the Portuguese concept of saudade (a key theme in Fado music), Galician morriña and Romanian dor.  link

From the Paris Review:

Hiraeth.
It’s pronounced “here-eyeth” (roll the “r”) and it’s a Welsh word. It has no exact cognate in English. The best we can do is “homesickness,” but that’s like the difference between hardwood and laminate. Homesickness is hiraeth-lite.   article

 Looking forward to overlapping this with  the other untranslatable words mentioned above,

and with
 yerida/aliyah

and
                                     C. S. Lewis' version of sehnsucht...


                                                                        even with  keening and  duende.

megachurch pastor moral failure: a beef about three sacred church cows..and a call to blow up three things (no, not the churches or the cows)

Yet another sad story about yet another megachurch pastor's moral failure.

I found one quote interesting, and telling, on several levels:

“You know he did a lot of good,” said Mitch Guetler, a church member. “He helped out a lot of people and I’m just really sad but like he always said up on stage—don’t follow him, follow Christ. So, you know, he’s a sinner like the rest of us and it’s just too bad.  (link)

My observations are not  a judgment on  the pastor or parishioner, but commentary (judgement) on church culture/language/assumed ecclesiology...sacred cows:


1)"up on the stage": Note the irony written large: It's from "up on the stage" that the pastor said, "Don't follow me."  Medium=message; medium contradicts sermon.  To paraphrase the EBay Atheist,  "What in the world is a stage doing in a church?

(See also Ed Stetzer's "It takes more than a stage to create a community:The Problem with Pastors as Rock Stars").

And why must it be UP?  See Brian Dodd on 

"Just go low. Don't worry about getting up":

Blow up church stages; they are oxmoronic and moronic.


 -----------

2)"Don’t follow me, follow Christ." It's amazing that people think this is in the Bible when Paul said basically the opposite.  (Don't get me started on folks who bet that "God will never give you more than you can handle" is in the Bible, yet the opposite is...ad infinitum, ad nauseum):

"Follow me, as I follow Christ" Paul, 1 Cor 11: 1.

Blow up those  "Don't follow me, I follow Christ" bumper stickers.

Create and sell a new bumper sticker that says,"Follow me because I follow Christ"...and give Brian Dodd all your profits . See Dodd's remarks on this in his important works "The Problem of Paul,"   "Empowered Church Leadership" (click here to read the relevant section)and  his dissertation, "Paul's Paradigmatic 'I': Personal Example as Literary Strategy"

 Paul admitted he was a "normal neurotic"  (Dodd, Problem p. 153), yet was worth following.
------------

3) "he’s a sinner like the rest of us."  Technically, he IS  like the rest of us...but like the rest of us, he's not a sinner."  I said "the rest of us," not "the best of us."  One does not have to be dead, Catholic, or perfect to be a saint.  According to the Bible, one just has to be a Christian.  Even a sucky one like me counts.    Remember that Paul calls even those bad Christians in 1 and 2 Corinthians what they are: "saints."

Blow up those "Just a sinner" T shirts.  How about "just a saint"?
 

You are a saint who sometimes sins, not a sinner who sometimes is a saint.
 

(I hate to argue with saints who think they are also sinners--like Luther and the Sarcastic Lutheran---but see  "kicking butts, hair in a bun, tattoos" and  "i find i relate more to the sinners than i do to the saints"and "Pope Francis, You Had Me at Hello, and Lost Me at Sinner")

Watching this Japanese interview of The Matrix stars is as trippy as the film itself

Watching this Japanese interview of The Matrix stars is as trippy  
as the film itself.   It was found on 15 Mind-Altering Facts About ‘The Matrix’ To Make You Say Whoa On Its 15th Anniversary.

(Oh, and Eugene Peterson was right!)

Sarah Kay: "If I Should Have a Daughter"/"Poetry is Like Pooping"

Sarah Kay's "If I Should Have a Daughter.." TED Talk on  spoken word poetry and education--
transcript here, video below.

See also her "Poetry is Like Pooping...and other writing tips" here.

 Official website 

 

Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo

7 Sentences That Sound Crazy But Are Still Grammatical

What Languages Sound Like..to Smoukahontas

see also:

Skwerl: How English sounds to non-English speakers

What's the most important command in the whole OT?

Form an answer in your mind
....and then...

check out Brueggemann's answer:


here.

“books talk to each other"

As Umberto Eco has written in his essay “Borges and My Anxiety of Influence,” “books talk to each other.” And if indeed “books talk to each other,” there is also a conversation—often unspoken—that goes on between fiction writers critics, and translators. -Link:Lydia Davis's Proust: The Writer as Translator, the Translator as Writer - 

"Skwerl: How English sounds to non-English speakers"

"SKWERL: A short film in fake English" by Brian & Karl: http://www.brianandkarl.com 

Press links:

Huffington Post
Buzzfeed
Gawker
Vulture
Business Insider
Matador Network

(language alert)

Ellul on SK: noise, Godsong and hearing through silence

Ellul,  The Humiliation of the Word, from Chapter 5: The Religious Conflict Between Image and Word

The present humiliation of the word is only the current version of a permanent reality: people detest the fundamental word, which nevertheless establishes them as human beings. As can easily be imagined, this is the central drama of every individual; it is another aspect of the death instinct. It is the key to the suicide wish and the real truth concerning the radical separation in a person’s heart. It explains his explosion when he denies what he has believed.

With brilliant insight, Kierkegaard has seen this better than anyone. (For this analysis I return to the first part of the previously cited book by Viallaneix, Kierkeguard et la Parole de Dieu. In this section, Viallaneix has thrown light on the degradation of the word especially well. But one should read her entire book.) Viallaneix has gathered his thoughts on the subject under the title "Captive Words," because all human words are overpowered by dissonance. And among these captive words can be discerned the forgotten word, which is the word of creation, the frozen word of philosophy, and the poetic word that is sung. We are made to live these words, but they have become incomprehensible to us when spoken; they lead to misunderstanding. The entire creation speaks, but instead of listening to this word, we want to see the secret of this creation. We want to see, and this leads to scientific demands. The words of creation, the world’s song, and the echo of Nature become confused words. According to Kierkegaard, God speaks this way, and creation tells of its creator. But we grasp only an echo that is actually a parody or a counterfeit of the creative word, which as human beings we can no longer hear because of our rupture with God. Nature "promises harmony and speaks to us of a divine message; but it gives us only incomprehensible signs which have to be interpreted." This is made essentially impossible by parasites on the wavelength and by interference, which prevent us from understanding this first indication of a possible word. These "noises of life" usher in all sorts of dissonance and drown out the intelligible word.

Kierkegaard then shows with prophetic vigor the kind of noise we experience today, whose importance he had discerned: the racket of the city, of speed, of politics and revolution, the racket of the press and of advertising, "urban chattering and gossip, like a snowy whirlwind" -- all this (and what would he say in our day!) utterly suffocates the word. "The problem with the daily newspaper is that it is expressly designed to glorify the present moment"; "nonsense, gossip, foolishness . . . these things are caricatures of the word; they transform it into impious chattering, yack-yack, so that the content of the message is scattered by senseless noises." "The retransmission of objective information is a parody of the communication of knowledge.,’ Faced with this mockery of language, Kierkegaard’s only possible response is "the catharsis of silence." Silence these noises and fall silent oneself. Nothing but silence can allow a person to hear a word of truth again as it traces its path through the echoes of nature.

Instead, people attach themselves to these noises. Thus they enter into another domain of the captive or betrayed word: the frozen word of philosophy, which claims to be listening for the ideal. Here again Kierkegaard appears to be amazingly ahead of his time, as he poses the basic question of the relationship between word and language. But he situates the question in its relationship to the rupture between human beings and God, between the word of human beings and God’s. "For the divine code, Nature’s code, and the human code are different. It follows that a person who tries to understand God’s message by himself is condemned to replace it with another message, from another language, which is human language." "The person puzzled by the jumble of words that creation whispers around him refers them to a linguistic system which he hopes will be able to tell him these words’ meaning.... The word is developed into a language; that is, it finds itself dialectically united to a language."

Kierkegaard proposes an observation (that for his time is astonishing) in which "the basic error in modern times is just this: being continually concerned with what one needs to communicate, rather than with the nature of communication." But after profoundly studying language as an ideal object, he discovers what we thought we had just recently discovered (Viallaneix deserves the credit for showing the extent to which Kierkegaard was ahead of us here!): that "each element of society has an element of discourse that corresponds to it. Both perform a function -- one in life and the other in language. The workings between these elements take on the same form. In short, there is an isomorphism in the human universe and the universe of discourse. Based on this fact, a human typology can be conceived based on an analogy with the study of language."

Language expresses what is deepest in a person, so that it should be clear and coherent. But its reality is quite different: confusion and gibberish. Human discourse has submerged us in misunderstanding and noncommunication, because language has triumphed completely over the word (Kierkegaard gives an extraordinary demonstration of this). So "language and thought are swallowed up by the same chaos." Once again, Kierkegaard connects this contemporary perversion with our inability to hear the Word of God. We substitute our own approach: logic, for example, or philosophical speculation, etc. It is pointless to fill in these outlines, which are found in Viallaneix’s book....LINK, full book

three more reasons to love N.T. Wright: his Cockburn and "skubala" references, and fearlessness about acknowledging he speaks in tongues

It should be no surprise that N.T. Wright has heard of Bruce Cockburn, let alone considers some of his songs "remarkable" (I'll bet his good friend Brian Walsh is responsible).  I hope you know that God  is "especially fond" of Bruce.  NT:

"..the remarkable songs of Franz Shubert, or indeed of Bob Dylan

 or Bruce Cockburn.." -p. 25, The Case for the Psalms

And it IS no surprise that he would be familiar with the "S-word of biblical Greek"--skubala (see this and this)
but that he would include it in an off-handed,   almost

Buy the T-shirt here

"some of you trainspotters will get the reference" winking kind of way..in his masterwork on Paul... just tops it off:

 ...Or (yet another voice from a different wing of the same house) how can we
continue to celebrate the deeply Jewish theological message of Paul if we have
to study the Stoics, the emperor-cult,all that pagan Religionsgeschichte which
we threw out as so much skybala?... p. 69, Paul and the Faithfulness of God

Bonus:  How about mentioning..in passing, as if it is no big deal, that has been known to speak in tongues,
somewhere in the middle of this presentation (sorry, can't find it now; I think it's Part Two, I will add precise time stamp when I do...Hey, can't go wrong watching the whole thing).  Whatever your take on the charismatic gifts, you should honor Wright's unassuming fearlessness and honesty.  If you want his  definition of tongues, see this; his overall take on tongues, see this.

The Noun Project: A Global Visual Language

http://thenounproject.com/