A random history of our spiritual lexicon

Richard Duffy

• Google has lots of nice toys but one I like to waste some of my time on is its ngram viewer. (http://books.google.com/ngrams/) This looks at a huge sample of the books published over the last 200 years and looks at how frequently each word is used as a percentage of all words used. For example you can chart the rise technology or find out that “your mom” has become quite popular since the 60s

Technology

Your mom

• Now if the ladies haven’t yet hit on the idea of putting baby names into it and the gents can refrain from charting the linguistic history of obscenity, these ngrams can give us an interesting insight into our culture.

We can learn about how we learn.

• ...and see that as we strive to bring hope to the world around us, we can see that what we say is a lot less important that it used to be.

• Showing people and giving people their own taste of this life God offers, seems to be beating the idea of telling people. Truth is becoming more experiential and less propositional

Truth?

We can see where our understanding of the trinity might be lacking...

• Now there are many reasons why the words God and Jesus have other uses outside of Christianity but even society’s adoption of the other words tells us that our focus on the Holy Spirit has clearly lagged behind. This graph also highlights that overall there has been less references to God then there previously had been. Now this could be explained by the fact that there are just more books on other things. But even this observation might hint to us that our relationship with God is sinking in a sea of distractions.

• One of the most interesting things I found was that maybe our motivation has shifted and we have lost sight of the culmination of our faith. Though we seem as able as ever to see the suffering of the world around

The three remaining elements from the end of 1 Cor 13 are in decline too and things are not looking good for the fruit of the Spirit, except for self control of

which we have psychology and self help to thank and patients possibly due to the

fact that it is a homonym.

I did find one positive trend

• I kid. I found this and I find it hopeful maybe something of eternity is buried in the heart of man. People are looking for something more. Maybe it’s not as far from us all as we think……..

• This was not scientific research it was just looking at observations to stimulate conversation about spirituality. You can probably use ngrams to undermine most of my points but I think its somewhere between interesting and fun.

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