In response to "Richard Russo's Catholic Language" (http://www.americamagazine.org/blog/entry.cfm?blog_id=2&id=A200C15D-3048-887F-8F76DADD9F3357E8)
In a recent interview on BustedHalo.com, an 'online magazine for spiritual seekers in their 20's and 30's', Richard Russo, a fiction "I was raised a Catholic but I am not a Catholic anymore but what has remained is the language of Catholicism...
Grace, original sin. Nothing make me more angry than to hear simple concepts that have been good and useful going back thousands of years, but now we can't talk about good and evil anymore, we've turned it into good choices and bad choices. Well screw that! We don't want to ground anything in morality anymore. We're going to secularize the entire language? We're going to neuter it?"
Russo's question is an important one. Why have terms associated with religion been deemed taboo for use in many parts of politics and media, or when they do occur, are so readily criticized?
It could come largely from the constant effort to separate church and state that has become a focus in America, and a near neurosis in parts of Europe. It could also be that using these sorts of terms of absolutes eliminate moral relativism and establishes one viewpoint as right.
Or maybe, it is that these words do not have a consistent collective meaning.
Religious doctrine and theology many times comes down to defining the terms. Different religion, different definitions. This has become particularly prevalent in the Conservative Movement in Judaism, which engages with traditional Jewish texts, bur primarily in English. There is a new trend to reclaim the terminology of Salvation used in many Christian sects. This is the translation of a fundamental point of Jewish theology, but Conservative Jews have shied from the idea since in English it appears to 'belong' to another religion. Each of these ideas of 'salvation', the same and singular word, differs dramatically.
Thus when using religiously charged language, a person runs the risk of having their message interepreted in very different ways by different audience members.
Are words without consistent agreed upon definitions still useful in clear communication? If not, where are they useful?
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Looking at words without consistent, agreed upon definitions like "grace" or "salvation" very simply as words with many definitions, I'd have to wonder why we are still using "open," "take," or "put" (all of which with mile-long entries in the dictionary) if words with several meanings are not useful in communication. I understand the comparison is a bit exaggerated, but if we can identify during conversation which "take" the person opposite us is using, I don't see how we can't do the same for "grace" or "salvation." This, I think, goes back more to what we discussed today about "sorry" and "thank you": rather than arguing that people do not communicating using these words because their meaning are unclear and controversial, it seems their use and meaning become controversial because people make such a big deal about using them.
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