This past week, for the first time, I cried in front of my graduate students. I teach a writing class to non-native speakers of English, and I have a tradition of bringing in donuts for them on the last class. But the donuts, I tell them, come with a story. My father died of a […]
Note: This post contains affiliate links. This is the third post in a series I’m doing on what it means to live in a “worded world” a world created, sustained, and governed by God’s speech. In the first post, I set out what I mean by the phrase “worded world.” In the second post, we […]
[[Note: This post contains affiliate links.]] This is the second of several posts I’ll be doing on principles for living in what I call a worded world, that is, a world that is made, sustained, and governed by God’s speech (click HERE to read the first post). Each of these principles comes from my book, […]
Note: This post contains affiliate links. This is the first of several posts I’ll be doing on principles for living in what I call a worded world. Each of these principles comes from my book, The Speaking Trinity & His Worded World: Why Language Is at the Center of Everything. In this first post, let’s […]
[[Note: This post contains affiliate links.]] Next to my desk is a framed letter. (I’ve written about the letter for Christward Collective.) My father wrote it to me when I was eight, right before he went into his first major brain surgery. (It chills my soul to imagine writing a letter like that to my […]
[[Note: This post contains affiliate links.]] For most of my life, I hated small-talk. It was forced language, spoken with complete awareness that you didn’t care about the discourse, that the words were as close to meaningless as they could be, that you should save your breath. Small-talk as Phatic Communion As I’ve taught English […]
Much lives in a single word. Near the end of his life, my father lost his ability to speak — one of the effects of pressure that his tumor was putting on his brain stem. Most of the time, he would point to pictures on a chart or try to indicate with facial expressions what […]
Our seven-month-old recently cracked the hard shell of language with her tiny tongue and came rolling into the linguistic world. I’m delighted to report that her first word was “da-da.” I’ve reflected on this a bit as I’ve watched her use that word over and over again for a few weeks. That little two-syllable expression […]
[[Note: This post contains affiliate links.]] Right now, the world around you is saying something. You’re being spoken to. Are you listening? If you are, then the world will not seem so cold and impersonal. You won’t feel like a stone rolling along a vacant parking lot, just hoping for the dream of God to be […]