Speaking of Sin: The Lost Language of Salvation

Rating:
Summary: She Speaks of More Than Sin
Review: From telling of her baptism at birth by a Catholic Priest, to attending Methodist & Baptist Churches on becoming a tenn-ager, to being a Seminary student at Yale Divinity School, Barbara Brown Taylor skips & leaps from the worlds of pluralism, post-modernism, even secularism... to the worlds of Karl Menninger, to Paul Tillich, to her Episcopal priesthood. I heard echoes of her Mercer Lectures focused upon "Worship of An Awesome God." One of those became the last chapter of her, "The Luminous Web!"

Professor Taylor finishes her first chapter on the lost language of salvation: "to speak of sin in any compelling way, we need to go diving for the core experiences that word names... We may discover that sin is our only hope." She describes the multiple ministeries of the Washington Church of the Savior, compared to the AA group meeting in the basement of a small Presbyterian, to find that they had one thing in common. There was tne absence of self-defense. There seemed to be no need to place blame.

From three Hebrew words for sin, as "missing the mark..." she concludes: "My concern is that neither language of medicine nor the language of law is an adequate substitute for the language of theolgy." She includes multi-cultures, multiple philosophies and many faiths in her awesome coverage of "the Lost Languages of Salvation!" This may top all of her long list of gift books.

Chaplain Fred W. Hood
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