Clean Lips

Christian faith magazine Fathom Mag has published a short piece which I wrote to prompt reflection and humility with regard to the Complexity, Power and Potential of Religious Language.

Here’s a short excerpt:

Religious language, then, is more than verses from a sacred text, rules about blasphemy and the particular jargon, texts and other ways of talking that mark us out as followers of organized religion.

More than these, religious language is all the complex ways we use language to mark as sacred different aspects of our lives and the world around us. To identify something as sacred means to set it apart from the ordinary. And indeed anything can be sacred, for whatever purpose we require.

Religious language, as an act of sacred making, reveals what we love, what we respect, what we protect, what we hate, and what we fear. Religious language has the capacity to build and enforce community boundaries, to connect and disconnect, to manipulate and control.