Friday, December 06, 2002

A plea, that might help lead to civility

The Catholic use of language can be a real problem. We obscure great and beautiful things in pompous tones and unclear words. We use the word "church" to mean an event, a building, a group of people we spend an hour with, an insitution, a collection of hundreds of millions of people, a collection of several billion people, and an invisible but real thing spread out across history, encompassing billions and billions of people, spirits, angels and ministers of grace. (sorry to go all Carl Sagan at the end.) Sometimes it's clear from context which is which, but I suspect a lot of arguments would be less heated if those in dispute would just define their terms, like in history class.

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