Learning to Speak God from Scratch: Why Sacred Words Are Vanishing-and How We Can Revive Them

by Jonathan Merritt

Holy phrases become tools of manipulation in the hands of angry religious leaders. They are fashioned into clubs by combative evangelists. And when shouted from the mouth of a street preacher outside a football stadium, Scripture becomes downright annoying.

The most common reasons given for not engaging in conversations about religion and spirituality appear to fall into three broad categories: indifference, ignorance, and avoidance.

I have friends who say that the most “loving” thing they can do is tell their “lost” friends that they are going to hell. The use of their words defines a meaning I cannot accept. Love is drained of compassion and forged into a machete, and Lost no longer describes the inability of all humans to find our way forward on our own. Their words separate a lesser them from a better us.

people who speak languages like English more readily blame others and have developed a “criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims.”

Despite robust efforts to explain how language emerged, they concluded, “The most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever.”

These Jewish thinkers treated language not as a corpse but as a living being with which we are invited to dance.