Learning to write in the tropics

When a published book goes into several editions at some point the author thinks it is a good idea to update a bit the preface, which is something like “why do this in the first place?’ type of writing. When I began this blog some three years ago it was a bit of a pandemic project connected to an academic need. While the need still exists it seems slightly mind-boggling to think I was living at the time in a country that still required masks. Although, that being said, I am now currently living in a country that almost two months ago recommended making masks compulsory again during the combined flu/covid season we were experiencing. Now, some years on, it might be a good idea to rethink this whole thing again or not. Sometimes it’s simply fine to ‘spill my guts’ as it were on here expressing what needs to be ‘screamed’ to the world at any give time. Until the world becomes too much and hibernation is necessary. This happened between July and December of the past year. The news was so u

Part of the reason linguistic matters have come to the forefront of my work is the particular way in which they related to my work on Edith Stein’s essay’s on Woman and the comments made by several friends on what they perceived to be her narrow view on women in today’s world. I couldn’t understand it at the time because Stein’s ideas are in line with their own way of thinking. My lack of understanding stemmed from not having read either the English or the Spanish versions of her essays.  This term I am tutoring a student who is analysing an evangelical influencer group that is anti-feminism but defend what can be understood as fractional complementarity. I felt she needed to read Stein to better understand the broader context of Christian Feminism and how the group she is analysing has failed to comprehend certain aspects of metaphysics, unsurprising given their evangelical background and how since Luther this has been a weak point in Protestant theology. My student does not read or s

 I am not a linguist. Fairly clear statement, but not quite. While I cannot explain the intricacies of language nuances or historical development of how we got Santiago from James or the other way around for a decade I have lived in three languages on a regular basis. Since I grew up bilingual this isn’t such a radical change in theory but the third language is German and German has the curiosity of being both very concrete and very diverse in each words meanings. Work, especially in relation to Edith Stein, has underscored the issues that can come up when a translation becomes to interpretive. The words that I have been thinking of this weekend is the German word for communicating and taking communion. In what may seem like a contradiction to the assumed exactitude of the German language the word for communicating and taking communion is the same: “communizieren” but seen from a different perspective, whether the use of the word in this was intentional or not, it allows us to meditate