Is Christianity Just a Mistranslation?

I grew up with almost no religious background. My mom was raised Catholic, and Dad was Methodist, which led to some pretty mixed messages about Christianity. Mom told me I should pray to Mary. Dad said to cut out the middle man and talk directly to God. My parents' childhood religions couldn't agree whether non-clergy were qualified to read the Bible or not, and the one time I tired to read it, I couldn't stop giggling about that line about not coveting thy neighbor's ass. My neighbor was an overweight woman who wore ugly polyester pants every day. Who would want her ass?

After failing to find a church they both could live with, my parents were satisfied if my brother and I claimed there was some higher power but didn't talk about or practice anything specific.

I knew very little about Christianity as a child. After I took an Asian art class as an undergraduate, I think I knew more about Buddhism than Christianity. Then I met my Jewish friends who tried to help me understand their religion.

I remember having a conversation one night with my friend, Jeff. He told me that Christians and Jews both followed the Old Testament and believed in the same God, but the split occured when Christians believed Jesus was the son of God. Jeff explained that Jesus, a remarkable man, was not God/his son because Mary was not a virgin, so it was not an immaculate conception, hence no miracle. Jeff said he was taught somewhere in his religious education that a mistranslation has occured. The word used to describe Mary essentially meant young woman, but in the language the text was translated to (sorry, I forgot what the two languages were--Hebrew to English?), there wasn't a perfect translation, so the concept "virgin" was used as the closest approximation for young woman. Some people read this as proof of an immaculate conception and two millenia of wars and bloodshed have resulted due to a poor translation between languages.

In The Handbook of Research of Writing (2008), Prior and Lunsford say, "the translation of a text often has high-stakes consequences" (p. 85). They continue, "Jewish translation histories are punctuated by frequent arguments over...which of the many Jewish langauges/dialects ought to be privileged as the target, especially because the most common tongue of the Jewish diaspora--the Hebrew used in sacred texts--may not be amenable to new work coinages" (p. 86). Is it possible that Christianity is the result of a mistranslation?

When I think about translations, scribes, and the fact that the Bible was written from stories passed through oral culture, my friend's explanation is plausible. Those of us who have studied a foreign language know there are not direct translations for all words in all languages. We also know that when copying for hours, it's possible to make a mistake, and those of us who have played the "Telephone Game" know how quickly words get distorted.

When I learned about Buddhism in my Asian art class, I remember God/Buddha decided to take an Earthly form and Queen Maya was the person he chose to be his birth mother. Kinda sounds like an immaculate conception to me. In Nepal, women pray to Queen Maya, which sounds very similar to the relationship many Catholics have with Mary. I wonder if Buddhism and Christianity can be traced back to a common story and if all religions ultimately derive from a single source which has been mistold, miscopied, and mistranslated to the point it has evolved into separate religions.

I'm not out to convert or proclaim any religion is wrong, but I believe it's very possible that many of the world's religions believe in variations of the same higher power. If Latin could be vulgarized into languages such as French, Italian, and Spanish, surely some Master Religion could have turned into Christianity, Judiasim, Buddhism, etc.

William Holmes McGuffey

I'm sitting in McGuffey Hall at Miami University while attending the 10th Annual Graduate Student Conference sponsored by the Educational Leadership department.

McGuffey Hall is named for William Holmes McGuffey, a former Miami faculty member, who has been mentioned in recent class readings for his contribution to literacy education, specifically though his famous Readers. I thought while I was here I would stop by the McGuffey Museum, but I was disappointed when the sign on the door said tours where by appointment only.

I did get a picture of McGuffey's house, located in the center of campus, though.

You can learn more about McGuffey and the museum (his house) by visiting the William Holmes McGuffey Museum website.

I also thought you might like to see the McGuffey statue which sits outside the hall which bears his name. When I was a student completing my bachelor's and master's degrees at Miami University, I would walk past both McGuffey's house and his statue on the way to class.

Love and honor to Miami...

(The beginning of the college fight song).

Still Stuck in New Criticism?

I need to get something off my chest. I've been thinking a lot about the format of dissertations. I recently read five dissertations for a class assignment and was beyond bored with the experience. The writing is just so formulaic and seems to defy everything I was taught about effective, engaging writing.

Last year I read a dissertation for the first time, and I just shook my head. The structure seems contrived, simplistic, and not far from what Tom Romano refers to the "five paragraph you-know-what." To me, the dissertation looks like a five paragraph "you-know-what" on steroids.

Nystand, (1993) in "Where Did Composition Studies Come From: An Intellectural History," describes the "five-paragraph theme" (p. 275) as an innovation of the formalist period tied to the tenets of New Criticism. I can't tell you how many education professors, in both my undergraduate and graduate education, have criticized the five-paragraph essay as a contrived school genre which is ineffective because it is inauthentic to the real work of writers. Let face it, how many of us have written a five paragraph essay outside of school in our adult lives.

In Ohio, we coach students to write five paragraph essays in high school so they can pass the OGT and get their diplomas. Is what we do to graduate students, advising them to write five chapter dissertations, really that much different? Isn't the dissertation format also a contrived school genre? How many published books about educational research are exactly five chapters?

I'm frustrated that compositionists recognize the limitation of the five-paragraph essay for college freshmen, but at the doctoral level, the highest level of study, we are less innovative and forward-thinking.

I've been talking to students and professors about this. Some professors have encouraged me to NOT write a five chapter dissertation while warning me I might not get my dissertation approved if I divert too far off the beaten path. One professor argued that the dissertation format in many way parallels the structure of intro, lit. review, question/methods, findings, and analysis that we see in journal articles and is hence an appropriate way to require graduate students to write.

The statistics of graduate students being ABD is depressing. Is it possible that the dissertation genre is part of the problem? We recognize that many middle and high school writers struggle with five paragraph essays but shine when they write poetry and other creative genres. Do some PhD students give up because they find themselves writing in an academic voice which isn't their own? In an attempt to provide a model of perfection for struggling writers to emulate, has graduate education done a disservice to their students?

It wouldn't be fair to criticize without suggesting an alternative, so let me suggest an alternative assessment. If the dissertation prepares PhD students for academic research and writing, could a student prove this competency by conducting X research studies and writing them as authentic journal articles which are submitted to peer reviewed journals? Wouldn't that also build a student's CV, impact the larger research community, and validate the student's scholarship by unbiased reviewers?

Wordle

A member of my writing group showed me Wordle today. It's a website where you type in a bunch of words and the site makes a word collage for you. Although the site generates the pattern, you have some control to move words and change their color and size. It's a really cool way to introduce poetry and the effect of word placement on a page.

What's Old is New Again?

This weekend I was reading Chapter 4 of Myers' Changing Our Minds: Negotiating English and Literacy. Although I was reading about the history of recitation literacy from the Civil War until the middle of WWI, I could have sworn I was reading a description of something I observed in 2000 during my student teaching.

Myers describes how signature literacy (if you could sign your name, you could "write") was replaced by memorization and recitation and "extensive reading though 'reading aloud' activities which 'required the teacher to do little more than assign selections to be read and, if he chose, to correct the pronunciation of his students'" (Finkelstein qtd. in Myers, 1996, p. 69). This description of 1880s literacy could have been written about scripted, direct instruction which is still being marketed today. The only difference is 19th century teachers had some autonomy in choosing their text selections. Thanks to thoughtful curriculum designers and textbook companies, that's already been decided for teachers lucky enough to teach in the districts which adopt these programs (can you sense my seething resentment?). All teachers need to do is sit back, read the script, and call on _________ to read the next passage aloud!

The Assocciation for Direct Instruction offers 160 lessons in Reading Mastery I. There are six levels total. You can read about lesson activities here.

Or you can watch Language for Learning, Lesson 44, Exercise 4. If you look closely, you can see the tape lines on the floor keeping the chairs in perfectly even rows. See how far we've come? The kids of the 19th century had to stand for their lessons, but 21st century learners can sit while they "toe the line" (Myers, 1996, p. 64).

The Future of "Good" Writing

In last week's class, I wrote that too many students believe "good" writing is correct grammar and mechanics. Monaghan and Saul (1987) explain in the 19th century, "'good' writing was taken to mean a mastery of capitalization, punctuation and syntax as well as correct spelling and pleasing handwriting" (p. 89). Growing up in the 1980s and 90s, I found most of my classmates viewed their writing in these terms, but why wouldn't they when the kind of feedback they received about their writing was red scrawls of "sp" for spellling errors and corrected punctuation?

As an elementary school student, I remember spending countless school hours writing upper- and lowercase cursive letters on specially lined paper. These lessons in penmanship were often the first comments students received about their "writing' ability. Matt was a "good" writer because he dotted his i's directly above their bases. On, I the other hand, was "unsatisfactory" because I couldn't make my s's behave.

I don't know how, but some time during my adolescence I got the idea in my head that "good" writers were ones who were engaging and creative. I remember being shocked when one of my most creative classmates told me I was lucky because I was a good writer. I didn't consider myself good. Sure, I could write grammatically correct sentences, but at the end of the day, I didn't write anything I felt was worth reading, and I certainly couldn't write engaging poems and short stories like this classmate wrote.

When I went to college, I had the opportunity to be a professor's assistant. I got to evaluate sets of preservice English teachers' papers and was shocked by how many simple errors existed in their writing. It was then that I realized a strong command of grammar and punctuation set one apart in classroom writing. Correct was "good."

Today, though, computers can check our spelling and suggest probable words. As we type, Microsoft Word creates colored squiggles alerting us to possible errors in subject-verb agreement and punctuation. These programs are far from perfect, but they are helping us come closer to "good," correct writing.

Schmandt-Besserat and Erard (2008) tell us in "Origins and Forms of Writing" in the Handbook of Research on Writing (Ed. Charles Bazerman), "The future of writing will also be determined by communication technologies" (p. 20). Already, word processors have obviated the need for good penmanship on most school papers, and text messaging and phone memo applications are quickly replacing the lists and notes we used to jot and leave on the kitchen counter. Will printed and typed text replace handwriting at some point? Will there come a time when handwriting notes and essays will seem as archaic as scribes copying books? If computers and other technology intuitively use the correct punctuation, capitalization and spelling in legible text, what will "good" writing look like a century from now?

War, Archetypes, Mayan Writing

This morning I read about structuralist criticism in Tyson's (2006) Critical Theory Today: A User Friendly Guide, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge). Basically, structuralists believe there are "underlying principles" (p. 209) which govern writing. For example, we can differentiate poetry from prose because all poetry shares some structural commonality which enables us to recongize it as poetry. By the same token, we know prose when we see it because it utilizes a structure we associate with prose.

Structuralist criticism also looks at the way a piece of writing may be structured internally. For example, The Great Gatsby is a "seek-find-lose story" (p. 236) because all of the characters' experiences follow this pattern. Gatsby seeks out Daisy after many years, finds her at Nick's house, and loses her again to Tom. Tom seeks a mistress, finds Myrtle Wilson, and loses her during the car accident. Daisy seeks a lover, finds one in Gatsby twice, and loses him both times--once to the war, the second time through death (Tyson, 2006, pp, 236-237).

Does anyone else have an overwhelming urge to reread The Great Gatsby? I love that novel! I've probably read it more times than any other book I own. I may have a borderline obsession with it, though, evidenced by the facts that my computer wallpaper is a picture of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I named my car "Gatsby."

But I digress. Returning to structuralism, Tyson explains the scholarship of Northrop Frye. Frye believes "the word archetype refers to any recurring image, character type, plot formula, or pattern of action" (Tyson, 2006, p. 223). Archetypes provide a narrative model from which other genres derive in the Western literacy tradition.

This evening I was reading "Writing and Secular Knowledge Outside Modern European Institutions by Charles Bazerman and Paul Rogers (2008) in the Handbook of Research on Writing. The chapter described how the Mayans "used writing to reinforce a ruler's military power and to legitimize his descent from noble ancestors and the gods" (p. 146). Later writing from the Mayans focused on themes of war and conquest. As I read this passage, I scrawled in the margin, "Archetype?"

If you think about most historical writing, especially that sanctioned by a ruler or government, isn't it structured in a way that paints the ruler as a hero? If we read a German school text from the late 1930s or early 1940s, would Hitler be painted as a hero or a villian? Would Hitler still be considered "evil" if he had been the winner in history? What about Saddam Hussein? Americans painted him as the villian, and by defeating and putting Hussein to death, America declared itself the hero-winner.

Patriotism is based on an archetype that one's government and country are good and those who challenge its way of life are evil, which is why citizenships texts are highly critical of other countries while praising their own (whether that praise is deserved or not). Structuralsim helps us understand that there are very few variations of human stories. Whether its 650 BCE or 2010 AD, the only way rulers can stay in power is to give their people the hero myth they expect. There's only one alternative--loser.

Writing one sentence saved me three hours! Wanna know how?

Today I used writing in a way I never have before. I thought my day would be spent in Kent attending the EHHS Doctoral Forum and having lunch with a friend, but a foot of snow changed those plans.

Did you know you can save yourself hours of shoveling a long driveway by sending a text message, such as "Please plow 555 Street Address," to my neighbor? It's amazing how much I accomplished with one sentence and $25 cash (worth every penny, BTW). He replied with "Sure" and stopped by the house a few hours later. He then texted back letting me know I could leave the cash in his mailbox down the street. Thanks to the convenience of technology, and writing, one can clear a foot of snow from the driveway with 30 seconds' effort.