Welcome to Litsy!

I don‘t think it‘s premature to count this as one of the best books I‘ll read this year. It would have been in my top books of 2018 but I didn‘t want to rush through it just to finish it by the end of December! McEntyre‘s thoughtful meditations on various aspects of language, and her suggestions on how to be attentive towards the words we use & the words we encounter, are powerful and timely. Highly, highly recommended. Caveat...⤵️

Trained imaginations are what we need most at a time like this. That is what will enable us to reach across cultures and understand each other, to think of new models and modes of organization that might work better, and to wage peace, because the love of beauty is deeply related to the love of peace.

Any effort to find reliable reporting needs to start not with questions about the sources but with questions about ourselves. What are my responsibilities as a citizen? ... What am I avoiding knowing? Why? What point of view am I protecting? Why? How have I arrived at my assumptions about what sources of information to rely on? What limits my angle of vision? Have I tried to imagine how one might arrive at a different conclusion?

Truth is elusive.
Truth avoids institutional control.
Truth tugs at conventional syntax.
Truth hovers at the edge of the visual field.
Truth is relational.
Truth lives in the library and on the subway.
Truth is not two-sided; it‘s many-sided.
Truth burrows in the body.
Truth flickers.
Truth comes on little cat‘s feet, and down back alleys.
Truth doesn‘t always test well.
Truth invites you back for another look.

Caring for language is a moral issue. Caring for one another is not entirely separable from caring for words. Words are entrusted to us as equipment for our life together, to help us survive, guide, and nourish one another. We need to take the metaphor of nourishment seriously in choosing what we “feed on” in our hearts, and in seeking to make our conversation with each other life-giving.

“There are gracious & inventive ways to enjoy words & to reclaim them as instruments of love, healing, and peace. All of us who speak, read, write, and listen to each other have opportunities to do that & to foster the kinds of community that come from shared stories & surprising sentences.”

I‘m loving this book. Its thoughtful reflections & challenges to “steward” language are beautiful & motivating & exactly my thing. And so relevant right now!

Yay, #bookmail! My pastor is leading a group focused on the tagged book, over the next three months. It sounds SO good! So of course I‘m attending... and so I needed the book... and of course I had to get a second book to qualify for free shipping... 😁 I‘m really excited about both of these!