Sanctity of life Sunday is a Sunday where the Christian church in the United States takes a day to remember, highlight, and acknowledge a cultural option in the United States for women to have abortions. Each church which celebrates sanctity of life Sunday will do it in their own way.
As I sit and think and respond to the things said at my Church, I have a few responses.
I am glad that this is important to us
A certain historical set of statistics were presented estimating the total number of aborted babies. Well, I wonder why are these statistics so accessible, but the number of people killed needlessly by police (or even just in the course of duty) are not accessible?
At my church the focus is on women. (And this might be uncommon nationally, or this might be a result of my own perception bias.) In fact this emphasis might be appropriately placed. I don’t think the intensity at which services for women are offered should be abated; but where are the services for men? Life – pregnancy – takes male and female. (Even my male homosexual friends who adopt children do not create the life sans the male-female union.) So, this apparent set of services offered to women, I wonder if it ignores men and their needs in the process – these services are often professionally offered by organizations financed by Christians. That is, the service providers are not bound by some government policy or stipulation to offer services to only women. But is the state of the asymmetrical offerings of services a result or reflection of culture bias in the United States or is it a reflection of government services to women to help them terminate pregnancies? Not that the entire governmental approach to women has not also been biased. For instance, in divorce courts there is often a bias against males. And WIC stands for “Women, Infant, Children” – where are the services for the men?
Becky and I were looking for some notable quotes about Bible translation and the importance of the Bible for our website – hughandbecky.org I was visiting WycliffeUSA’s website and I noticed a quote from Bishop Desmond Tutu.
If you want to keep people subjugated, the last thing you place in their hands is a Bible. There’s nothing more radical, nothing more revolutionary, nothing more subversive against injustice and oppression than the Bible.
—Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Quote by Desmond Tutu on Wycliffe.org
I wasn’t quite sure who this fellow was – I mean he could have been Desmond from Lost for all I knew. But alas no, he was Desmond Tutu. A really influential activist who is generally well respected among world leaders.
But the thing with quotes is that they can mean what every the quoter wants them to mean when they are removed from their original context. In the context of the WycliffeUSA’s page where this quote was found, it makes sense as it is positioned as an appeal to people who might be interested in giving to Wycliffe through the Federal Government’s matching donation program.
However, I wonder does it make sense to use the quote at all? Here is the reason – Does using the quote in some way put the organization WycliffeUSA in a position where it equally is endorsing Desmond Tutu? This is an interesting situation given the reported position that Desmond Tutu, also a world recognized church elder, has on homosexuality. (Specifically, Desmond Tutu is pro gay rights by having an anti-discrimination of gays position, granted these two points of view not be the same thing depending on where in the world one is viewing the situation from and what the social/cultural attitudes are surrounding LGBT issues in the ego society.) The interesting position is that WycliffeUSA takes an anti-LGBT postion, as many christian conservative organizations do.
The question of inference I think is one where perhaps Desmond Tutu is a better diplomat and politician than conservative christian Bible expositor (as others from South Africa point out).
But in terms of orignal context, it is still interesting that WycliffeUSA, wants to be known by this quote, because it was not a reflection directly of or on them – the only connection is, well the Bible.
I have been looking for RDF ontologies for describing Bible portions. Particularly so that I can reference sections of scripture like chapter and verses of the bible (in addition to sections of books of the bible like The Prophets or The New Testament). Does such an ontology already exist? I have found http://bibleontology.com but this does not seem to be deep enough. I have also found http://www.semanticbible.com/ but the ontologies offered here do not seem to fit the desired coverage.
In recent time there has been a lively discussion over several issues in the translation of the Bible between various denominational and church leaders and those conducting the translation. I am not aware of all the issues, nor all the details. However, my financial supporters and friends are very interested in this discussion. Many of them are coming to the conversation late in the discussion. They do not always start to observe the discussion from the beginning of the discussion. They usually get introduced in the middle, and they do not know enough of the context of the discussion to make heads or tails of the discussion.
The Bystanders
In the end I lose credibility with my supporters if they are confused and their confusion goes unaddressed. So, I have a vested interest in explaining this conversation to my supporters and friends.Here is an example from 15 February 2012 (14:21CST) of the question I have had and the type of response I have given:
Hugh, I recognize you are not a spokesperson for Wycliffe but there is a lot of “buzz” right now of WBT ad SIL creating Bible versions that are less offensive to Muslims by taking out references to Jesus being the Son of God and to God as the Father. Do you know of this and what is your understanding of it?
My Reply:
Yes. I know a little bit about it. The issue has been brewing for the last 6-7 months. But I don’t know very much about the issue because I do not deal with that part of the world. I do work in External Communications. So my boss works with the people who are crafting the responses. There are several issues going on at the same time.
Wycliffe as a corporation, and as a partner of the evangelical church has not been proactive in communicating the challenges in translation to the churches.
The church has had an attitude of “support and forget”: until someone gets offended and then doesn’t know all the facts and comes at the issue with a particular theological (denominational) view.
To complicate the matter. SIL has been dragged into this media firestorm but has traditionally been silent on translation around the world and left that discussion to Wycliffe. But now SIL has had to respond. So this is new and virgin territory. SIL has said more on Bible translation in the last 6 months than it has in the last 15 years.
Neither Wycliffe nor SIL has taken the lead on explaining to onlookers to the discussion, what the whole discussion on a time line looks like or what the facts are. There are two sides in this discussion and both NGOs would do well to present the objections and the replies in a manner where onlookers could get all the facts. I do not even have a good grasp on this. But there is a lot of fear on the part of the NGOs that if they do this that they will reveal too much, because this is not an area of the world that either company publicizes that it works in. I think there are only like 9 translations in question. The only thing I have read about the issue was here: http://www.wycliffe.net/stories/tabid/67/Default.aspx?id=2408
My question has been if you use the analogy that Jesus is socially the “son” of God, rather than being sired through sexual intercourse with (the virgin) Mary, then how is the zygote formed? I have always believed in a virgin birth (No intercourse), but I also believe that the sperm must have been from God and the egg from Mary.
At any rate the controversy has pitted the churches against the Mission and churches are pulling their support for missionaries.
However, I need to do it understanding the issues they can see and read about. I am not a spokesman for any company. But, as this discussion has turned into a media war, it has increasingly become hard to tell what WycliffeUSA has or has not said when. Content at the same URL can change through time. WycliffeUSA, Wycliffe Global Alliance and SIL International do not use two things consistently in their communications strategy which would make communications clearer to viewers. (Examples in footnotes
WycliffeUSA
WycliffeUSA Page without a date published on it.
SIL International
SIL Uses month and year but no specific day.
Translations with the same dates but posted later.
Wycliffe Global Alliance
Wycliffe Global Alliance has no date posted, date.
Wycliffe Global Alliance has a date someone else posted on an item which is republished with permission.
Wycliffe Canada does have a date something was published!
Wycliffe Canada has the date something was published.
). These two issues are:
Post Dates
and
Update Notices with Dates/time stamps.
It is common practice when issuing a statement online to provide a date on which the content was posted. It is also common practice to show when content has been updated or altered and to tell what has been altered, often it is in response to something left in a comment (in the blogging and columnist worlds).
(I do not necessarily espouse the views of the following post but I use them to present visually what is socially a common practice.)
It has been claimed that WycliffeUSA has altered their FAQ in a manner which would lead current viewers to think this is always been the way the data has been presented, and therefore always the way the story has been told. If there has been some change then this change should be clearly expressed. (And there are functional, well designed, and tactful ways to express this change without spending lots of page space or focus to the reader in the process of doing so.) However, it is this lack of date giving which makes a time oriented anthology of communication so valuable.
[Update: 5 March 2012: As the following image shows, it would appear that Wycliffe does have an update notice for each item on their FAQ sheet, but it still remains unclear what the content was updated from, or alternatively if the FAQ element was added at this later date as the FAQ page itself has no date published.]
WycliffeUSA Update Notices as of 5 March 2012
[mf_timeline]
If you know of another Publicly available and verifiable resources, event or discussion with a date relevant to the Son of God discussion leave a note in the comments and I will consider adding it to the time line. After I add it to the time line I will delete the comment. The timeline created is This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Another timeline format is also in the works and is appearing here.
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