Athanasius as Evangelist: God Haunts Us Through Our Own Words

The Anastasis Center blog, Jan 22, 2018. A 10 minute read. God reminds us that we are moral agents in a framework larger than ourselves, through words like good and evil, justice and injustice, love and selfishness, etc. which are morally “larger” than us. This post reflects on God’s use of language in Genesis 1 - 2 and a short passage from Athanasius’ Discourse Against the Arians 2.

The Role of Language and Community in Spiritual Formation, in Plato and Jesus 

This paper — written for Dr. Evie Holmberg's class on Greek from Plato to the Greek Fathers at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox Seminary in Fall 2018 — examines the communal contextuality of language, as well as the relationship between kataphatic and apophatic language.  Part of its original purpose is to argue against a synthesis between Christian theology and Neo-Platonic philosophical paganism, despite the similarities in terms.  This observation can become an argument for the simultaneity of church and Scripture on linguistic-historical grounds (because Jesus himself used human language in particular ways), but the priority of church over Scripture on linguistic-philological grounds.  The paper also serves to illustrate how an apophatic approach to language does not negate kataphatic language, as analogical language does not collapse into equivocation. 

Paul's View of Headship in Marriage: How 1 Corinthians Interprets Ephesians and Colossians

The word “head” (Greek kephale) has stirred up much interest and controversy because of the way it is used in husband-wife and preacher-congregation relations. This paper argues that Jesus and the apostles established a Christian liturgical practice of men and women preaching and praying, in order to stabilize the meaning of the word kephale. It argues that the word kephale as found outside the New Testament and the LXX Old Testament demonstrate too much instability of meaning that it could not possibly be deployed by Jesus and the apostles unless a normative Christian practice stabilized it and accompanied its use. In fact, only if this is true can 1 Corinthians be fully integrated with Ephesians and Colossians, ethically and philologically. The paper draws on a longer exegetical analysis of 1 Corinthians 11:2 - 16 called Men and Women in Worship Together. This position challenges Protestants who believe that Scripture comes before church, which effectively means that the Christian liturgical context did not play a role in the interpretation of words found in Scripture. It challenges Orthodox and Catholics who believe they have faithfully and thoroughly preserved the original Christian liturgy from its origins. These papers argue that neither position is true.

The Council of Nicaea, the Origin of "the Trinity," and the Limitations of Human Language 

Slides to a presentation on the linguistic, theological dimension of language which made the Nicene Creed both possible and necessary. This exemplifies the need for the Church to standardize its own language, to stabilize the meaning of key words, and to take an active interest in the work of translation.  Prior to the debates about the Trinity, Greek and Latin had no words to express “person” as an eternal reality. The Greek prosopon and the Latin persona, were words used in the theater for the masks worn by actors. They were temporary, which was reinforced by various philosophies insisting that our human lives on this earth were temporary.

Slavery: How the Early Church Got It Right

Presentation given October 2, 2021 to the Reconstruction class. Explores early Christian emancipation and abolition. While Christians did not eliminate all forms of servitude, since servitude for civic penalties, indebtedness, war captivity, and self-indenture persisted, Christians eventually did eliminate what we know as chattel slavery. The presentation examines Old Testament institution of the Hebrew ebed servant, and the New Testament approach to Greco-Roman modes of servitude. We glance at how colonialism and Trans-Atlantic slavery deformed traditional Christian teaching, mindful that more slavery exists today across the globe than every before, and that in the U.S., indebtedness and incarceration show that we have greatly exaggerated the claims that the U.S. has done better than the Bible on “slavery” and its constellation of challenges. These studies highlight especially how the Hebrew word ebed (translated into English as slave) was transformed and stabilized as it was brought into the story and laws of Israel. This continued in the New Testament. But Protestants (especially) who were already de-stabilizing biblical words to craft new meanings justified chattel slavery under the biblical words. In the U.S., “conservative” Christians thought that to defend the Bible, they had to advocate for chattel slavery. Meanwhile, post-Civil War “liberals” believed they had done better than Jesus and Paul by abolishing it, so in order to retain a place for Scripture, now perceived to be ethically inferior and primitive, they continued de-stabilizing words to give them new meanings, a trend which continued in liberal mainline Protestant churches on resurrection or marriage and so on. Both “conservatives” and “liberals” were wrong, which is why they encouraged/allowed for racialized criminal justice under the 13th Amendment, along with massive indebtedness, situations strenuously limited by the Hebrew ebed institution and New Testament ethics. For the full studies, see Slavery and Belief Systems.

A Theology of Living Systems

Slides to a presentation given for Jeff Bass, for his class Living Systems Ministry, in Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, in May, 2019. It highlights how God designed creation, humanity, and human language as living systems which we need to study in order to learn about Him and ourselves. Language is a living system.

Ethnicity, Culture, and Christian Faith: A Paradigm and a Questionnaire 

A brief informal questionnaire which highlights cultural differences among people; touches on language as a factor in cultural differences.

Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture. Orbis Books | Amazon page, Jan 1, 2009.

Oliver Raphael Phillips, Culture Trumps Religion, Every Time: The Ethno-Cultural Challenge for the Church. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform | Amazon page, 2013.

Admin, Report: Some 2nd Century Roman Christians Hated Latin Mass Because It Was Said in the Vernacular. Eye of the Tiber, Aug 7, 2014.  A satire, but on some level it must have been true, as Romans once spoke predominantly Greek, as reflected in the fact that Paul wrote his letter to the Romans in Greek.

Donald T. Williams, Philology the Handmaid. Lantern Hollow Press, Oct 19, 2015.

George Repper, 'For I will Pass Through the Land of Egypt This Night, and Will Smite All the Firstborn': St. Gregory of Nyssa and the Allegorical Sense of Scripture.  Eclectic Orthodoxy, Feb 6, 2019.  A trend from Origen of Alexandria, and later Gregory of Nyssa, to deal with difficult questions in the Hebrew Scriptures, but de-Judaized Christian faith in favor of Platonic Hellenism.  This is a linguistic-cultural-philosophical decision that had a major impact on Christian faith.

Alan Sisto and Shawn Marchese, Supper’s Ready. The Prancing Pony Podcast #189, Dec 6, 2020. This is a reading of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers, and an exploration of orcs and their languages. Tolkien, a renowned philologist, portrays orcs as having simplistic and corrupted tribal languages primarily because their natures and interests and activities have become so warlike. Tolkien, in effect, makes a fascinating argument about how languages develop or degrade.

Samuel Loncar, Christianity’s Shadow Founder: Marcion, Anti-Judaism, and the Birth of Liberal Protestantism. Marginalia, Nov 19, 2021. Loncar examines the characteristics of the second century anti-judaic heretic Marcion of Rome, and the Protestant liberalism that originated in Germany with Friedrich Schleiermacher and his heirs. This indirectly raises the problem of the stability of language and meaning: Amputating the Old Testament from the New means that Christian faith becomes deeply unstable. If allowed to continue, the especially Lutheran — and more general Protestant — presuppositions about human nature, personhood, divine justice, and atonement could no longer be checked.

Noam Chomsky, Limits of Language & Mind. Logos Philosophy Overdose, 1978. argues for a genetic basis for human language. Also Noam Chomsky, The Concept of Language. University of Washington Video, 1989. Chomsky acknowledges a brief history of the nationalization of language in France, Italy, etc., why language changes, etc.

Noam Chomsky, Propaganda Terms and What They Mean. From a speech recorded Mar 1990. Oneal Rodriguez, Jul 16, 2022. On double-meanings in political discourse.

Umberto Eco, Ur-Fascism. The New York Review of Books, Jun 22, 1995. discusses the role of language in political life, especially the threat of fascist leaders: “14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in 1984, as the official language of Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.” In a short 5 minute video, tour guide and pop historian Rick Steves explains how Hitler used simple language and emotionality to construct a fascist Nazi government in Rick Steves, Hitler Takes Power. Rick Steves Classroom Europe, 2017. 

Bonnie Azab Powell, Framing the Issues: UC Berkeley Professor George Lakoff Tells How Conservatives Use Language to Dominate Politics. UC Berkeley News, Oct 27, 2003. highlights how conservatives use language as a sign of belonging, and how voters vote their identity, not necessarily their economic self-interest

Geoffrey Nunberg, How Language Is Used to Deceive You By the English Teacher You Wish You Had. lecture Jun 17, 2004. examines the role of language in political speech, largely in the American right at the time of George W. Bush. Very prescient about the patterns that would continue over the years. Language indicates belonging. Language from the right is used to neutralize political opposition from the left. Etc. He gives a linguistic history of Republican leaders’ rhetoric, as well, showing that the Southern Strategy turned the GOP away from “liberalism” even in the rhetorical sense, sending it towards an anti-democratic, fascist direction.

David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton University Press | Amazon page, 2007. about the Indo-Europeans

Theresa Elms, Lexical Distance Among the Languages of Europe. blog, Mar 4, 2008.

Lera Boroditsky, Lost in Translation: How Language Influences Culture. Wall Street Journal, Jul 23, 2010.

Peter McGraw, What Makes Things Funny? TEDxBoulder, Aug 2010.

Gordon S. Wood, What Made the Founders Different. Mercer University, Nov 18, 2011. At the 29 min mark, Wood discusses how Americans and Scots were in two cultures simultaneously. provincial and imperial/global. in the British Empire, and Dr. Wood, an American historian, notes that the greatest American novelists are bicultural: Midwesterners like Theodore Dreiser; Southerners like William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor; African Americans like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison; Jewish American writers like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth. In the British world, Irish-British writers like Jonathan Swift, James Joyce; Scots like David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, John Ferguson. Compared to the complacency of the English at this time.

Alex Wain, 25 Handy Words That Simply Don't Exist in English. Simple Happy blog, Apr 29, 2012.

Steven Pinker, Linguistics as a Window to Understanding the Brain. Big Think, Oct 12, 2012.

Alan Massie, In Everything We Say, There Is An Echo of 1066. The Telegraph UK, Oct 13, 2012. on why the Norman invasion of England elevated French words like "dine on beef" over English words like "eat cow."  See also Sian Ellis, How the Normans Changed England. British Heritage Travel, Sep 1, 2012.  See also M, How the Norman Conquest Affected England and English Literature. Jotted Lines blog, Dec 15, 2012.  For some academic citations concerning the Magna Carta as more of a facade, and tension between Norman Episcopal see and traditional English abbey - fascinating to consider when the English reasserted their language as the language of law and governance in the 1362 by royal command:  an act of linguistic decolonization.  Noted by Barbara A. Sasso, In Code Switching: Celebrating Cultural Dialects in American Speech. Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, 2015. on how to teach the history of the English language in a way that is relevant to modern debates about English, Ebonics, Spanish.

Sara Gates, Tonal Languages, Music Ability Linked in New Study of Cantonese Speakers. Huffington Post, Apr 5, 2013.

Olga Khazan, How Parents Around the World Describe Their Children, in Charts. The Atlantic, Apr 12, 2013.

Ella Frances Sanders, 11 Untranslatable Words From Other Cultures. Maptia blog, Aug 26, 2013.

Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman, Words Can Change Your Brain: 12 Conversation Strategies to Build Trust, Resolve Conflict, and Increase Intimacy. Avery | Amazon page, Jun 2013. “Using brainscans as well as data collected from workshops given to MBA students at Loyola Marymount University, and clinical data from both couples in therapy and organizations helping caregivers cope with patient suffering, Newberg and Waldman have seen that Compassionate Communication can reposition a difficult conversation to lead to a satisfying conclusion. Whether you are negotiating with your boss or your spouse, the brain works the same way and responds to the same cues. The truth, though, is that you don't have to understand how Compassionate Communication works. You just have to do it. Some of the simple and effective takeaways in this book include: • Make sure you are relaxed; yawning several times before. not during. the meeting will do the trick • Never speak for more than 20-30 seconds at a time. After that they other person's window of attention closes. • Use positive speech; you will need at least three positives to overcome the effect of every negative used • Speak slowly; pause between words. This is critical, but really hard to do. • Respond to the other person; do not shift the conversation. • Remember that the brain can only hold onto about four ideas at one time.”

Walter Hickey, 22 Maps That Show How Americans Speak English Totally Different From Each Other. Insider, Jun 5, 2013.

Noam Chomsky, What is Language and Why Does it Matter? Linguistic Society of America, Jul 27, 2013.

Prospero, Do Different Languages Yield Different Personalities? Economist, Nov 5, 2013.

Alan Yu, How Language Seems To Shape One's View Of The World. NPR, Jan 2, 2014.

Jamila Lyiscott, Three Ways to Speak English. TED Talk, Feb 2014.

WNYC, 60 Legal Words That Blurred the Lines Between War and Peace. RadioLab, Apr 18, 2014. On legal language since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and Representative Barbara Lee (D-Oakland, CA) voting against war.

Alice Robb, Multilinguals Have Multiple Personalities. The New Republic, Apr 23, 2014.

Karthick Ramakrishnan, Slate, You're Doing it Wrong. AAPI Voices, May 15, 2014.

Economist, Gained in Translation: When Moral Dilemmas Are Posed in a Foreign Language, People Become More Coolly Utilitarian. Economist, May 17, 2014.

Mitch Mosley, Can Language Influence Our Perception of Reality? Slate, Jun 2014.

Arika Okrent, Feast Your Eyes on This Beautiful Linguistic Family Tree. Mental Floss, Oct 23, 2014.

Priya Joshi, Learning a New Language Stimulates Same Pleasure Centres in the Brain as Sex and Chocolate. International Business Times, Oct 25, 2014.

Jessica Love, Psycho Babble. The American Scholar weekly column.

Paul Langley, Liquidity Lost: The Governance of the Global Financial Crisis. Oxford University Press | Amazon page, 2015.  Langley is not a Christian author that I know of, but this book is invaluable as a record of how Anglo-American bankers and politicians defined the financial crisis of 2008. They defined it in terms of liquidity with regards to themselves. to which the answer was "quantitative easing"., but in terms of risk of default with regards to Greece. to which the answer was "austerity".. This suggests that some people get to define problems and solutions for political reasons, where the labeling of the crisis already prescribed a solution, and how the labeling favored Anglo-Americans and crippled everyone else; this is an excellent study in cultural anthropology; see also book review by Sarah Hall. Journal of Cultural Economy, Jul 2015. and Journal of Cultural Economy.  

Laura Santhanam, Linguists Link English, Hindi to Single Ancestor Language Spoken 6,500 Years Ago. PBS, Feb 20, 2015.

Conor Friedersdorf, Gays, Traditionalists, and the Feeling of Being Under Siege. The Atlantic, Apr 6, 2015.

Ian Sample, Neuroscientists Create 'Atlas' Showing How Words Are Organised in the Brain. Guardian, Apr 27, 2015.

Daniel Dalton, 23 Perfect Words for Emotions You Never Realised Anyone Else Felt. Buzzfeed, Apr 27, 2015.

Alberto Lucas Lopez, A World of Languages - and How Many Speak Them. South China Morning Post, May 27, 2015.

Jack Jenkins, What The GOP Candidates Meant When They Were Talking About God At Last Night’s Debate. Think Progress, Aug 7, 2015.

Donald T. Williams, Philology the Handmaid. Lantern Hollow Press, Oct 19, 2015.

Angus Chen, Did The Language You Speak Evolve Because Of The Heat? NPR, Nov 5, 2015.

Matthew James Roberts, Every Word So Employed: George MacDonald and the Theological Imagination. Fellowship of the King blog, Nov 14, 2015.

Uyghur Script. Omniglot: The Online Encyclopedia of Writing Systems and Languages, 2016. Based on Sogdian, which was based on Syriac, which was based on Aramaic; traditional Mongolian script was based on Uyghur script. This may be relevant to showing Syriac Christian influence.

Charles Taylor, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity. Harvard University Press | Amazon page, Mar 14, 2016.  Taylor relates language and moral development.

R.K.G., China's Tyranny of Characters. Economist, Jul 5, 2016.

Gaia Vince, How Language Is Processed By Your Brain. CNN, Aug 16, 2016.

Julie Sedivy, How Morality Changes in a Foreign Language. Scientific American, Sep 14, 2016.

John Metta, It's Not About Race! Medium, Sep 18, 2016.  Race is a proxy for culture.

Jessica Brown, English Words That Have Totally Different Meanings Around the World. Indy100, Oct 16, 2016.

Rod Dreher, On Time: Arrival. The American Conservative, Nov 24, 2016. great exploration of neuroplasticity and language.

Philip Perry, Does the Language We Speak Affect Our Perception of Reality? Big Think, Dec 4, 2016.

David Robson, The Untranslatable Emotions You Never Knew You Had. BBC, Jan 26, 2017.  Words for emotions that don't exist in English but do in other languages.

A.R. Williams, Ancient Parchments Reveal Old Texts Concealed by Newer Ones. National Geographic, Mar 2017. “In a sixth-century Egyptian monastery’s library [Saint Catherine’s], high-tech imaging of parchments reveals thousands of pages of hidden text.” Demonstrates the interest that Christian scholars and monks took in languages from early times. See also Richard Gray, The Invisible Poems Hidden in One of the World’s Oldest Libraries. The Atlantic, Aug 9, 2017. notes the recovery of Christian Palestinian Aramaic, previously unknown Greek poetry, and medical treatises. See also Kathy Brown, Lost Ancient Texts Recovered and Published Online Through International Partnership. UCLA Library News, Dec 19, 2017.  For fantastic images of the manuscripts.

Tim Urban, Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future. Wait But Why, Apr 20, 2017.  Note the early section on language and its impact on human life.

Alix Spiegel, Invisibilia: A Man Finds An Explosive Emotion Locked In A Word. NPR, Jun 1, 2017.  An emotion blending furious anger and deep lament.

Michael Gavin, Why Do Human Beings Speak So Many Languages. The Conversation, Jul 16, 2017.  An intriguing theory by ecology and environment.

Susannah Rigg, The Confusing Way Mexicans Tell Time. BBC, Jul 26, 2017.

Eli Cook, How Money Became the Measure of Everything. The Atlantic, Oct 19, 2017.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, When Words Don't Belong to Everyone. Random House, Nov 7, 2017.  A short YouTube video about how oppressed people “own” language about themselves.

Jackson Wu, Unity and the Korean Language. Patheos, Apr 25, 2018.

Lena Boroditsky, How Language Shapes the Way We Think. TED, May 2, 2018.

Ben James, A Sneaky Theory of Where Language Came From. The Atlantic, Jun 10, 2018.  James mentions Noam Chomsky and others who believe that linguistic complexity emerged near-instantaneously.

Lily Loufbourrow, We Are in a Linguistic Emergency When It Comes to Trump. Slate, Jun 14, 2018.  An intriguing consideration of how political and media use of words shapes perceptions.

Densho, It’s Time to Retire WWII-Era Euphemisms for Japanese American Incarceration.  Densho blog, Apr 26, 2019.  Highlights the importance of language in naming political crimes and misdeeds.

Christopher Ingraham, Nearly Half of White Republicans Say It Bothers Them to Hear People Speaking Foreign Languages. Washington Post, May 8, 2019.  This should be studied as a trauma response to losing power dominance and social insider status.

John Iadarola and Brett Ehrlich, Study: Republicans Afraid of Different Languages. The Damage Report, May 9, 2019.  Demonstrates a political dimension to a psychological and spiritual challenge.

Tradecraft and Joe Navarro, Former FBI Agent Explains How to Read Body Language. Wired, May 21, 2019.

Adam H. Johnson, Twitter. Oct 19, 2020.  Wrote after the Bolivian election of left-wing presidential candidate Mr. Arce, “editors, reminder: elections in the global south have “hand-picked successors”, white countries have “party leaders” & “Vice Presidents”. Black & brown electeds have “loyalists”, white electeds have “supporters”. Black & brown countries have “strongholds”, not “bases of support.”” David Doel, Bolivia Elects Socialist Govt 1yr After Rightwing Coup. The Rational National, Oct 19, 2020. Notes that even the normally neutral Associated Press expressed skepticism about Bolivia’s election.

J.L. Tomlin and Thomas Lecaque, Trump’s Language of Hate Has Deep Roots in American Religious Bigotry. Foreign Policy, Nov 5, 2020. “Catholics were the first scapegoats of the new republic, but others followed.”

Lisa Feldman Barrett, People’s Words and Actions Can Actually Shape Your Brain — A Neuroscientist Explains How. TED, Nov 17, 2020. 

“How do the people around you influence your body budget and rewire your adult brain? Your brain changes its wiring after new experiences, a process called plasticity. Microscopic parts of your neurons change gradually every day. Branch-like dendrites become bushier, and their associated neural connections become more efficient. Little by little, your brain becomes tuned and pruned as you interact with others. Some brains are more attentive to the people around them and others less so, but everybody has somebody. Ultimately, your family, friends, neighbors and even strangers contribute to your brain’s structure and function and help your brain keep your body humming along. This co-regulation has measurable effects. When you’re with someone you care about, your breathing can synchronize, as can the beating of your hearts — whether you’re in casual conversation or a heated argument. This sort of physical connection happens between infants and caregivers, therapists and clients, even people taking a yoga class or singing in a choir together.”

60 Minutes Australia, Foreign Accent Syndrome: The Medical Mystery Leaving Analysts Stumped.  60 Minutes Australia, Jun 20, 2021.  Interesting to consider “identity” in connection with how we are accustomed to sounding, to ourselves.

Roger J. Kreuz and Leah Cathryn Windsor, How Trump's Language Shifted in the Weeks Leading Up to the Capitol Riot. Yahoo! News, Jan 15, 2021.

“From early December to early January, there was an increase in the use of words that convey movement and motion – terms like “change,” “follow” and “lead.” This is important, because it signals that the undertone of the speeches, beyond the overt directives, was goading his supporters to take action. By contrast, passive voice is often used to distance oneself from something or someone. In addition, research on linguistic indicators of deception has found that people who are lying often use more motion words. We also looked at Trump’s use of presidential language during the same time frame. Researchers have identified the hallmark features of presidential language. These include using more articles – “the,” “an,” “a” – prepositions, positive emotion, long words and, interestingly, swear words.”

Krystal Ball, Employers Know Your Class Status in Seven Words. Rising | The Hill, Apr 27, 2021. How speech tends to indicate a person’s class background; politics aligned by class are more effective and broad than politics aligned by race

Mark Steyn, Our Increasingly Unrecognizable Civilization. Imprimis: Hillsdale College, Apr/May 2021. concludes his piece by arguing that “the Left wins because it seizes language.” I agree that the Left seizes language, but so does the Right, and this pattern extends backward historically: “slavery” in early US history wrested from Scripture and distorted, along with “freedom,” and “law and order.” This tendency goes back to the conservative impulses carried into the Protestant Reformation, which “seized language” from Scripture as ammunition against the Catholics. It was proto-fascist. The American Left seizes language because of how legal, even constitutional, language functions as laid down by the American Right’s overwhelming interest in property rights.

Father Stephen Freeman, A Noetic Life. Glory to God for All Things, Sep 17, 2021. demonstrates the importance of language through the Greek term nous, which carries the meaning of mind, but not simply in its analytical capacity but also spiritual perceptiveness and moral imagination.

Williams Roberts, Native Americans Share Long-Ignored Thanksgiving Truths. Aljazeera, Nov 25, 2021. “Wampanoag community is telling its Thanksgiving story as nationwide push to recognise Indigenous history in US grows.” This article includes the fascinating detail that the Wampanoag language is being revitalized and reconstructed using a Bible that was translated into the tribal language 350 years ago.

Lorraine K. Bonnie, 80 Years After Executive Order 9066, the Supreme Court Still Shuts Its Eyes to Reality. Just Security, Feb 18, 2022.

First, we need to be particularly wary when we are told that a governmental action is “not about [fill in the blank with an improper target of discrimination, e.g., race, religion]; it’s about [fill in the blank with a facially legitimate policy objective, e.g., national security, public health or safety, protecting the U.S. economy or way of life].”

Second, and relatedly, it is essential to reject arguments based on facial neutrality and instead root out policies that, by design or impact, fall most harshly on racial or religious minorities. In Trump v. Hawaii, the Court upheld the Trump administration’s travel ban, which primarily targeted nationals of majority-Muslim countries. The opinion repeatedly emphasized the fact that the proclamation was neutral on its face, stating: “The text says nothing about religion.” The Court said that Korematsu was different: “[I]t is wholly inapt to liken that morally repugnant order [in Korematsu] to a facially neutral policy denying certain foreign nationals the privilege of admission.” The Court failed to recognize that EO 9066 was also facially neutral; it similarly said nothing on its face about race. 

Rebecca Fishbein, Is Therapy-Speak Making Us Selfish? Bustle, Apr 2023. “Boundaries are important. But our relationships require a touch more compassion than some online blueprints offer.” “I’m in a place where I’m trying to honor my needs and act in alignment with what feels right within the scope of my life, and I’m afraid our friendship doesn’t seem to fit in that framework,” the friend wrote. “I can no longer hold the emotional space you’ve wanted me to, and think the support you need is beyond the scope of what I can offer.”

Lawrence O’Donnell, The Name of Trump-Echoing Liar Jim Jordan's Committee is a Lie. The Last Word | MSNBC, May 18, 2023. O’Donnell points out how semantic infiltration works. “Fox News” is Rupert Murdoch’s lie that he gets the public to utter; Jim Jordan’s subcommittee “investigating” government abuse is a lie as Jordan himself violates rules in his own subcommittee.

Chris Hayes, What the Republican Debt Ceiling Threat Is Really About. All In | MSNBC, May 23, 2023. Hayes points out that Republicans do not want to “spend less,” because they have never spent less. Hayes argues that the GOP simply wants to tank the economy so Biden gets the blame. Another example of how words cannot be believed on their face.

Michele Martin, Kristin Du Mez: Project 2025 Will Redefine Constitution in Name of Christianity. Amanpour and Co., Jul 23, 2024. Around the 10 minute mark, Du Mez observes that the Christian Nationalists define “freedom” in the Christian sense only as freedom to obey God, not in the original civic and legal sense. The “pursuit of happiness” means the “pursuit of blessing.”

Ari Melber, MAGA Propaganda Decoded: Obama’s Fave Historian Shreds Trump Tricks with Groundbreaking Scholarship. The Beat | MSNBC, Sep 12, 2024. Basic observation: Truth is rare, historically. Information is common, but mostly untrue. Algorithms are “editors” experimenting on millions of human guinea pigs, deciding what is on the front page of big print newspapers. One observation comes from Trump’s rally when the lights went out, and Trump masterfully turned it into a positive thing. What happens when the “dictator” dictates that up is down and right is wrong and true is false?

Heather Cox Richardson, March 12, 2025. Letters from an American | Substack, Mar 13, 2025. HCR points out how the GOP is changing the meaning of the word “day”:

The government that Trump and Musk are destroying, with the complicity of their party, is popular, and Republican members of Congress are apparently unwilling to have to vote on the policies that are putting their radical ideology into place. In an extraordinary move yesterday, House Republicans made it impossible for Congress to challenge Trump’s tariffs.

The Constitution gives to Congress, not the president, the power to impose tariffs. But the International Emergency Economic Powers Act allows the president to impose tariffs if he declares a national emergency under the National Emergencies Act, which Trump did on February 1. That same law allows Congress to end such a declaration of emergency, but if such a termination is introduced—as Democrats have recently done—it has to be taken up in a matter of days.

But this would force Republicans to go on record as either supporting or opposing the unpopular economic ideology Trump and Musk are imposing. So Republicans just passed a measure saying that for the rest of this congressional session, “each day…shall not constitute a calendar day” for the purposes of terminating Trump’s emergency declaration.

The Republicans’ legislation that a day is not a day seems to prove the truth of Burke’s observation that by trying to force reality to fit their ideology, radical ideologues will end up imposing tyranny in the name of liberty.

David Pakman, They're Changing the Definition of inflation! The David Pakman Show, Mar 16, 2025. Republican pundits and leaders are retrofitting Milton Friedman’s “monetarist theory” onto inflation. Pakman gives several examples.

Lisa Friedman, An Offhand Remark About Gold Bars, Secretly Recorded, Upended His Life. New York Times, Jul 1, 2025. A lesson on political spin with words taken out of context. “Brent Efron’s “boring” Tinder date wanted to hear all about his work at the Environmental Protection Agency, so Mr. Efron talked. If only he’d seen the hidden camera.”

Jennifer Rubin, Words & Phrases We Can ‘Totally and Completely Obliterate’. The Contrarian | Substack, Jul 1, 2025. “Trump’s falsehoods endanger national security.”

“The “tell” in Donald Trump’s lie about the results of the U.S. bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites was “completely and totally.” It is one thing to claim (falsely) that we “obliterated” the Iranian program, but “completely and totally obliterate”? After all, “obliterate” means “to remove utterly.” Did we truly “completely and totally remove utterly” Iran’s nuclear threat? Well, no. We did not.

For one thing, approximately 880 pounds of 60% enriched uranium is “missing.” The Iranians had apparently moved the stockpile stored underground at the Isfahan facility. Moreover, even the most optimistic talk from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggests the program was set back only a couple of years. The U.S. assessment suggested we bought only a few months. The Trump team spent days frantically trying to deny that, even attempting to divert attention from its misrepresentation by attacking Fox News Pentagon reporter Jennifer Griffin, perhaps the only real reporter left there.

Moreover, we did not even try to hit all underground facilities. “The US military did not use bunker-buster bombs on one of Iran’s largest nuclear sites [Isfahan] last weekend because the site is so deep that the bombs likely would not have been effective, the US’ top general told senators during a briefing on Thursday,” CNN reported. You cannot “obliterate” what you never try to hit. Worse, the Iranians have now learned that the way to protect their sites is to go as far underground as Isfahan.

To add insult to Trump’s bruised ego, the Washington Post reported, “The United States obtained intercepted communication between senior Iranian officials discussing this month’s military strikes on Iran’s nuclear program and remarking that the attack was less devastating than they had expected, said four people familiar with the classified intelligence circulating within the U.S. government.” Ouch.”

Jack Revell, Trump Doubles Down on Erroneous Claim About ‘Big Beautiful Bill’. The Daily Beast, Jul 5, 2025. “The president has repeated his previously criticized statement.”

Tad Stoermer, Can We Still Teach World War II the Same Way? Resistance History Dispatch, Jul 31, 2025. When the State of Israel uses the Holocaust in order to kill and starve Palestinians, Holocaust history has been completely undermined.

Insoo Hyun and Vardit Ravitsky, What Does It Mean To Be Human in the Age of AI. Museum of Science, Sep 2, 2025. At the 7:30 minute mark, Hyun and Ravitsky discuss the importance of language to the ability to reflect on the concept of one’s self.

Brian X. Chen, The New AirPods Can Translate Languages in Your Ears. This Is Profound. New York Times, Sep 18, 2025. The technology is one of the strongest examples yet of how artificial intelligence can be used in a seamless, practical way to improve people’s lives.

Kristin Kobes du Mez, On Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence. Du Mez Connections | Substack, Sep 26, 2025. And on the meaning of words. After commenting on “squishy words” that can be deployed against anyone for anything, du Mez observes Stephen Miller’s tweet after Governor Gavin Newsom went on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show. Miller tweeted, “This language incites violence and terrorism.”

Barry Ferns, The Prejudice That Links Race and Class, Gary Stevenson and Desmond Tutu. Barry's Economics, Feb 1, 2026. Accents, word choice, and how we hear them.

Annie Roth, A Mutation Gave Humans the Gift of Speech. These Mice Have It, Too. New York Times, May 6, 2026.