Faiths in Their Pronouns

The pronoun is the very mother tongue of thought. Family and race, nation and society, the clamant us and ours of collectives, resolve into I and singular You, the transacting pronouns of all human discourse. Pro-nouns are well styled, for they function on behalf of rights, claims, dignities and demands. Acquisitive and discursive, they transact the business of existence. It follows that pronouns are the essence of religion: their usages dictate the liability of religious faith. Their handling is a sure clue to the idiom of creed or ritual. If the web is society, then the speaking faiths of pronouns I, we, us, ours, they, thou, you, them come into their own in our keyboard encounters. Extending the metaphor, the net allows pronouns to intercept meaning, and to substitute for lack of clarity in argument and understanding. Insofar as religions as grammars provides a proper analogy, Faiths in Their Pronouns aims to explore their pronounal internet in hope of wiser courtesy and surer mutual discovery, a hope that is well captured in the face and hands of Raphaels etching.

Kenneth Cragg was first in Jerusalem in 1939, and subsequently became deeply involved in areas of faith between Semitic religions under the stress of current politics. He later pursued doctoral studies in Oxford where he first graduated and became Prizeman' in Theology and Moral Philosophy, and where he is now an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College. He was a Bishop in the Anglican Jurisdiction in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Middle East, and played ecclesiastical roles in Africa and India. A Certain Sympathy of Scriptures is a companion book to his Readings in the Qur'an (1988; 1999), and more broadly to his Faiths in Their Pronouns: Websites of Identity (2002). Other works by Bishop Cragg, and published by Sussex Academic Press, include: With God in Human Trust -- Christian Faith and Contemporary Humanism; The Weight in the Word -- Prophethood, Biblical and Quranic; and The Education of Christian Faith.