Quotation of the Week
We focus a lot on the adjectives. We want to be special, unique…We take those markers of specialization and turn them into entirely different entities. Grammatically speaking, we take adjectives and turn them into nouns. In politics, conservative and liberal used to describe a person’s beliefs, but now these terms stand for the person themselves. When I hear people say, “He’s a liberal,” I want to ask, “He’s a liberal what?” Or, “She’s a conservative.” She’s a conservative what? A conservative cook? A conservative Zanzibarbari? Our grammatical tendency to build dividing walls has seeped into the Church too. We don’t have mainline Christians and evangelical Christians, we have mainliners and evangelicals. Instead of focusing on the commonality we share with others, we emphasize our differences, making the differences our whole identities rather than just aspects of who we are.
We focus a lot on the adjectives. We want to be special, unique…We take those markers of specialization and turn them into entirely different entities. Grammatically speaking, we take adjectives and turn them into nouns. In politics, conservative and liberal used to describe a person’s beliefs, but now these terms stand for the person themselves. When I hear people say, “He’s a liberal,” I want to ask, “He’s a liberal what?” Or, “She’s a conservative.” She’s a conservative what? A conservative cook? A conservative Zanzibarbari?
Our grammatical tendency to build dividing walls has seeped into the Church too. We don’t have mainline Christians and evangelical Christians, we have mainliners and evangelicals. Instead of focusing on the commonality we share with others, we emphasize our differences, making the differences our whole identities rather than just aspects of who we are.
From Tyler Watson
Quotation of the Week: Two for the price of one
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