Words

The Weekly Wrap: May 4-10

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The Weekly Wrap: May 4-10

Thanks, Mom!

My mother passed away nearly fifteen years ago. But I can never forget her or all the ways she shaped my life. She was intelligent and loved learning. If I remember rightly, she won a statewide chemistry contest in high school. But she also had so much practical sense, managing our house when dad was away, and coaching me how to handle bullies at school. And I spent a lot of time sick in my first years of school and she nursed me through repeated bouts of the croup and other childhood illnesses.

I mentioned my mom was intelligent. She was a reader and because of that, we had a house full of books, mostly hers. Some were stored in the back of my bedroom closet and it was an adventure to crawl in there and explore! I don’t recall any books being off limit.

My mom liked to read over lunch. And so did I. Then we would talk about what we were reading. It didn’t matter that hers was historical fiction and mine was a baseball biography. Maybe that is where this love of talking about books came from.

I don’t recall my mom either reading to me or teaching me to read. She just loved reading and left her books all over the house. And I think that is why I became a reader, which has immeasurably enriched my life. And so, on this Mother’s Day weekend, I say once again, “Thanks, Mom!”

Five Articles Worth Reading

So many of us who read love words. We look up unfamiliar ones. We relish the sound and rhythms of well-crafted poetry or sentences. Bennett Kleinman compiled “The Most Beautiful Words in the English Language, According to Linguists.” Fittingly “mother” was one of these. But my favorite, “evanescent,” was not included.

While we are thinking of mothers, no two mother-child relationships are the same. To understand our mothers is one aspect of understanding ourselves. In “What to Read to Understand Your Mom,” Sophia Stewart recommends seven books on different kinds of moms.

But for some of us, the need is more immediate, and our thought is what to buy mom for Mother’s Day. And of course, as readers, our thoughts turn to books. Well, I’ve got you covered! “Our Favorite Books for Every Type of Mom” is a great list of book recommendations. Whether she loves thrillers, historical fiction, is a foodie, or even a baseball fan, you’ll find something on this list!

If it weren’t for Johannes Gutenberg, books would hardly be so commonplace. I wonder if we would even have bookstores. But what do we know of the man? In “Start the Presses!,” Joseph Hone reviews a new biography by Eric Marshall White, Johannes Gutenberg: A Biography in Books.

Finally, in the latest salvo of our current U.S. president’s culture war, we learned yesterday of the firing of Dr. Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress since 2016, the first woman and first Black to hold this post. No reason for the firing was given. The Library of Congress not only serves as a library and research service for Congress. It is also our national library, the People’s Library. It administers copyright in the U.S. and provides services to other libraries and to researchers. I have used its digital resources. Publishers Weekly discusses Dr. Hayden, and the reactions to and implications of her firing in “Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden Fired by White House.”

Quote of the Week

Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard was born May 5, 1813. He observed:

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”

I am a staunch defender of free speech but would also be the first to admit that it is often exercised without forethought, in ways that exacerbate conflict rather than contributing to more harmonious relations and the pursuit of the common good.

Miscellaneous Musings

Reading Jakob Hutter: His Life and Letters, I was sobered by how this Anabaptist forebear, and many who were with him, suffered with courage for their faith. In this country, we tend to wear crosses rather than bear them. The latter is actually truer to the faith, that either suffers or deeply identifies with the suffering.

Incidentally, that’s a theme of A Prophet in the Darkness on the art of Georges Rouault. Rouault often juxtaposed, especially in his Miserere series, images of the poor, the marginalized, and the suffering Christ.

It is common to complain about the postal service. But I think I owe our mail carrier big time! On one day this week, we received five different book packages, including one from overseas. Even our oversize mailbox couldn’t contain everything and so she placed them neatly on our stoop. Note to self: I need to figure out how to let our local postmaster know how much we appreciate her service.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Graham Greene, The Lawless Roads

Tuesday: James W. Barker, Writing and Rewriting the Gospels

Wednesday: Curt Parton, Until the Last One’s Found

Thursday: William Kent Krueger, Northwest Angle

Friday: Emmy Barth Maendel and Jonathan Seiling, Jakob Hutter: His Life and Letters

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for May 4-10, 2025!

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page

Review: Speaking Peace in a Climate of Conflict

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Speaking Peace in a Climate of Conflict, Marilyn McEntyre. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2020.

Summary: Engaging with the works of contemporary writers, discusses how our care for words that are clear, gracious, and truthful is vital to the pursuit of peace in a contentious world.

After the last two election cycles in the United States, there are very few who would not attest to the power of words to incite verbal and sometimes physical conflict. It raises the question of whether or not words may also have a similar power to lessen tensions and forge concords between people. This is the question that Marilyn McEntyre, who is known for her books on words and their power, explores in this work. As she proposes in her introduction, this is not a book about nice neutrality, but rather how we might speak with truth and clarity and grace even when we must say hard things or stand against an injustice.

She begins by warning against reliance on codified meanings of words because words are malleable and important ones must be defined when we use them–words like war, peace, health, freedom, and love. She observes that euphemisms nearly always conceal ugly realities, such as “collateral damage” and must be interrogated. Language also has the power to remind us of who we are, what story we inhabit, what the values and ways of our place are.

She reminds us of the enriching power of allusions while suggesting that we “mind our metaphors”–for example the combative metaphors used in treating cancer. Alluding to Emily Dickinson, she discusses the value of telling it “slant,” approaching truth obliquely rather than bluntly, with story and art rather than confrontation. We ought promote poetry, because it is a unique form of telling truth “slant.”

McEntyre believes there are times it is necessary to articulate our outrage, when silence betrays the suffering. Civility is concerned with the common good, and when this is in jeopardy, one may need to call out the ways peace and justice are being outraged. She offers seven questions well worth consider that I want to record to remember:

  1. What am I hoping to protect?
  2. What principle is at stake?
  3. Am I the most appropriate person to step into this ring?
  4. What am I risking?
  5. What makes it worth the risk?
  6. Is this the moment?
  7. What would be the consequences of holding my peace?

One chapter I’ve found vital amid this is her chapter on checking facts. More than once, I’ve shared a compelling meme or statement, only to find it was false or taken out of context. Sources and attributions matter, and when the facts really do add up, one has strong impetus for moral action. Along with establishing facts, we need to resist the temptation for simplistic explanations. We need to recognize our discomfort with ambiguity and over-simplistic readings of texts.

Her concluding chapters are on the value of laughter and the folly of our insistence upon winning. Laughter doesn’t slight hard realities, but sets them in place–that there is a goodness and delight to life that remains reflecting the joy of the Creator as well as our own ridiculousness. Instead of “winning” McEntyre suggests “inviting, exploring, musing, modeling, reframing, reflecting, challenging.”

One of the delights of this work is that McEntyre commends examples of writers who do such things: Wendell Berry and Arundhati Roy remind us of what we know, Mary Oliver and Toni Morrison tell it “slant,” W. H. Auden and Marian Edelman articulate outrage, and Brian Doyle and Anne Lamott help us laugh.

I reflect on McEntyre’s words as I am in the midst of Ohio’s senatorial primary vote today. Candidates have stressed how they will “fight,” a couple have boasted of being Marines, and how negotiation, compromise, and working across the aisle are “weak.” We are far more practiced and accustomed to conflict, and yet I am struck that we are often fighting our own people. “A house divided cannot stand.”

I have often mused that there are times when children do not understand that playing with matches can burn the house down…until they burn the house down. Whether we are speaking of the house of our democratic republic or the collective house of our planet, we stand near a precipice where our words can propel us over or pull us back from the edge. McEntyre’s book is a kind of primer for the robust speech of freedom and peace that is not “nice” but forthright, has both clarity and imaginative richness, and both names wrongs and offers a path to set wrongs aright. What has the speech of discord gotten us but an angry, divided land? Might it be time and past time to lay aside the speech of discord and practice the speech of concord. Might it be time to seek and speak peace and pursue it?

Thoughts and Words

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I reviewed Adam Smyer’s You Can Keep That To Yourself yesterday. He make’s this interesting observation at the beginning of the book:

I will tell you what not to say, but I will not tell you what not to think. Think whatever you like.

Let’s review.

THOUGHTS are the things on the In side of your head. They are invisible. Your thoughts are yours. No one else’s. No one else wants them.

WORDS are the things that exit your hole to the Out side of your head, where we are. They are a lot like thoughts, except that we can hear them. We don’t want most of those, either. You can keep them.

Adam Smyer, You Can Keep That to Yourself, p. 9.

Smyer’s book is about the insensitive things “well-intentioned people of pallor” say to Black people. But there is a principle here that is worth considering in all situations: you don’t have to say everything you think.

This is a principle I’ve called to mind again and again during the past election season. Whenever I’ve failed to observe it online, I’ve ended up responding to those who disagreed with me, wasting too much of my one precious life. How liberating it was to realize that I didn’t have to respond to an objectionable comment. I could respond in my head and hit mental “send” and let it go.

There are so many times when I’ve wished I could stuff words back into thought-land. Unfortunately, you can’t. All you can do is clean up the mess.

I personally wonder why people feel compelled to disagree on matters of taste. If you don’t like butter pecan ice cream, you really don’t need to rain on my parade. Why not just share your own favorite, like cookies ‘n cream–or whatever!

I like how the New Living Translation renders Proverbs 10:19:

Too much talk leads to sin. Be sensible and keep your mouth shut.

There are times, though, when we do need to speak. It’s one thing to think about what not to say. What tests may we apply to discern what we should say? There is a test developed by Herbert J. Taylor and introduced to the Chicago Rotary Club that was eventually adopted by the Rotary International and called the Four Way Test for these four questions:

1. Is it the TRUTH?
2. Is it FAIR to all Concerned?
3. Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS?
4. Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?

Imagine applying this to work conversations, our marriages, and everything we post online. Imagine if we could get all our politicians to pledge to this simple test and keep everything that doesn’t meet the test in thought land.

I suspect using this test, if nothing else, will incline us to say less. Sometimes, by pausing and using this test I find my initial thought was wrong and not what I really think, or would say. If I am not sure in some situations how to answer, it can help. After all, should I say what I’m thinking when I’m not sure of the answers to the questions of the Four Way Test? Probably not.

Just remember. You don’t have to say everything you think. Less is more.

Writing as Naming

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I came across a statement this morning that captured why I write. It is from one of my favorite writers, Tish Harrison Warren, in a new book co-edited by Tim Keller and John Inazu, Uncommon Ground. She writes:

“When we write, we participate in Adam and Eve’s vocation in the garden: the vocation of naming. We give words to reality, and through our words, we help shape reality” (p. 73).

Both my outer and inner worlds often feel inchoate. Whether it is making sense of what I am thinking and feeling, describing the gist of a discussion among colleagues, or trying to discern some thread of meaning in the chaos of modern existence, I find myself turning to writing.

I write to know what I think. Sometimes I write to figure out what I think. When I review, I write to crystallize in a few words the thousands of words I’ve read in a book. Sometimes writing is the way I sort out my own sense of how I should live in pandemic times. I give words to reality, and at least shape how I will engage that reality, if not the reality itself.

Writing as naming is communal as well. It certainly is in a medium like that which on which you read my words, or in magazine articles, newspapers, and books. Our writing gives shape to reality not only for ourselves but for others. One of the tests of good writing for me is whether others recognize the reality I’ve tried to name as their own. I love it when someone writes back and says, “you found words to describe what is was like for me.”

More than that, writing as naming, when done well clarifies how we will work together. Lawyer friends of mine tell me that this is at the heart of a good contract. I’ve learned a great deal about getting the words right from my attorney friends. It is equally important on a work team as we discern and decide what we will work on together, and what we each agree to contribute to that work.

I’ve never been a writer of fiction, but I suspect this is part of what drives these writers. They are not just telling a story. They are creating a world. I think of J.R.R. Tolkien, who created Middle-earth, fashioned languages, and a whole mythology of origins and cosmology. That is some serious naming!

For babies to receive a name, a mother must give birth. Many writers describe the labor of giving birth to words that name as akin to the birthing experience. Finding the right words and phrases, the right composition of paragraphs is hard. There is such a difference between “almost right” and “just right.” I think any of us who write feel we rarely totally achieve that end. Sometimes, it feels that the beautiful or pithy thing we want to say is out there, just beyond our grasp. One thing for sure: for writers, words matter.

Why then do we do it? I think it comes back to what it means to be human. We are naming creatures, gifted with amazing language powers far exceeding any other creature. While not all of us are drawn to writing, all of us use words to describe our world. Writing simply allows us to deliberate our words (hopefully) and to extend them in space and time, extending them beyond the circle who can hear our voice, and the ephemeral moment of our utterances.

This helps me understand a bit more why I write.

Booknerds are Wordnerds

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“Booknerds are Wordnerds,” Photo © Bob Trube

It’s not universal, but if you meet a booknerd (or are one), chances are good that underneath there is also a wordnerd. By that, it means you enjoy learning new and unusual words, or have fun with puns, you like a good turn of phrase or you play word games like Scrabble or Words with Friends, or love to immerse yourself in a good crossword puzzle.

Recently, my “Question of the Day” at the Bob on Books Facebook page was “Curious to see if lovers of books are lovers of word games like Scrabble? Are you?” A number responded and I tallied 109 “yeses” and 22 “nos” to my totally unscientific poll. The number of responses however, and the margin, as well as common sense, suggests there is something to this.

Reading is a celebration of words strung into sentences or verses, paragraphs or poems, engrossing or informing us. Studies such as this one point to a relationship of reading and vocabulary growth. Like many of you, when I came across an unfamiliar word and asked the meaning, a parent or teacher usually said, “there’s the dictionary; look it up.” We do love when authors use words well. Some of us also write, and know the difference between the right word, and the “nearly right” word.

I’ve discovered that the kinds of word games we like to play reflects our personalities. Some of us are much more solitary, preferring word searches, word puzzles, and crossword puzzles. Others of us are much more social and love games like Scrabble or Words with Friends. For some, our love of words spills over into love of facts and we like to play “Jeopardy” or Trivial Pursuit. There are certain games we are passionate about. One person loves to play Scrabble though he rarely wins. Another wrote, “Words with Friends for fun; Scrabble for blood.”

Scrabble was the game most mentioned, which may just be a function of the way I asked the question. Next came crossword puzzles followed by Words with Friends. There were a few other old standards including Boggle (one of my favorites) and Upwords. Bananagrams, CodyCross, word search puzzles, Trivial Pursuit and Jeopardy also garnered multiple votes. The most interesting and unusual game was FreeRice, a multiple choice quiz game, that includes a vocabulary version, that donates 10 grains of rice for every right answer to the World Food Programme (this is not an endorsement of the game or organization).

One of my old favorites is Fictionary, because there is no game to buy. All you need is a dictionary that people take turns searching for obscure words that everyone else makes up “fictional” definitions while the real one is mixed in and then people try to guess which is the real one. I’ve gotten hours of laughter from that one!

Not everyone who loves to read loves word games, and that is fine. Some just like reading more and seeing word games competing with reading. The most frequent thing I saw were people who did not feel they were good at spelling. I wonder if there were some bad memories there. I heard someone recently who was a music teacher say that those who thought they couldn’t sing well were often told they couldn’t sing as children. Maybe the same applies to word games.

For many of us, though, our love for books and our love for words and games with words, go hand in hand. Is that so for you?

 

Review: Hidden in Christ

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hidden in Christ

Hidden in Christ: Living as God’s Beloved, James Bryan Smith. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press/Formatio, 2013, 2019.

Summary: Thirty short reflections on different key words found in Colossians 3:1-17 on what it means to be “in” Christ.

A number of years ago, I had the chance to go through James Bryan Smith’s The Good and Beautiful God (review) with a group. Perhaps one of the most challenging and rewarding parts of this study was memorizing Colossians 3:1-17 together, a verse or two each week, forcing us to really meditate on each word of the text. The first three verses of this text are as follows:

Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.  Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. (Colossians 3:1-3, NIV)

The title of this work draws on verse 3, and one of the themes Smith explores is what it means for us to live in Christ. Above all, it means to live as God’s “holy and dearly loved” people, (verse 12). In this pocket-sized work, James Bryan Smith leads us through a kind of lectio divina on this text in Colossians, focusing successively in 30 chapters on key words found in the text, offering short reflections on each one. For example, the first five are drawn from the verses above: raised, with, seated, set, hidden. As he considers the word “set” in verse 2, he offers these reflections:

   When it comes down to it, living the Christian life is simply a matter of where we set our minds. Every waking moment we have a choice about where, and on what, we will set our minds. That is something we are free to do. Having been raised with Christ and forgiven forever, and having Jesus with us in all we do, the primary practice of living as a Christian boils down to what we think about, what we dwell on, what values we keep before our minds, what truths (or lies) we have in our consciousness. (p. 37).

In addition to these brief reflections, there are sections about “Living into the Truth,” an “Affirmation” which is a brief statement summarizing the key truth represented by the word, a “Prayer,” and finally questions for “Reflection.” The short chapters and focus on a single word make this an ideal devotional resource that could be used over a month, or perhaps once a week for thirty weeks. There is also a group discussion guide at the back of the book for a five week discussion using six chapters each week.

In addition, this little book is a good introduction to the ideas in the Apprentice Series by the same author–or perhaps in my case, a good refresher. Recently, a paperback version of the book has been released, making it available at a lower price. What Smith models for us is the slow, reflective opening of ourselves to the message of scripture we often pass by in our instant-everything world. When we omit these practices, we do not gain time but lose the chance to hear God’s assurances of our belovedness.