When I saw that Mark had taken this quiz on his blog I wondered what my accent would come out as. Here are my results:
What American accent do you have?
Your Result: The Northeast
Judging by how you talk you are probably from north Jersey, New York City, Connecticut or Rhode Island. Chances are, if you are from New York City (and not those other places) people would probably be able to tell if they actually heard you speak.
I know that the quiz asks too few questions to really be accurate, but the results are disturbing nonetheless. The troubling thing about this quiz is that it confirms what lots of people have said to me all of my life. I'm from North Carolina. I was born and raised there. But whenever I tell people that, I receive a puzzled look and the comment, "Really? You don't sound Southern." *Sigh* I suppose that that's the price I pay for having grown up in Cary (Containment Area for Relocated Yankees).
While I had not really intended to, it seems I have entered into a blogging slump over the past month or so. There are many reasons for this brief hiatus, not least of which was just that I felt no compulsion to write anything. After the emotionally, spiritually and intellectually draining finale of last semester I and several of my fellow WTS bloggers have entered a sort of lull. That said, this month I’m going to be doing research on hermeneutics, linguistics, philosophy of language and philosophical theology in an effort to put together a paper impressive enough to serve as a writing sample when I start sending out applications to philosophy programs in the next year. As I’m still trying to narrow down my research to some sort of thesis, I figured I’d post some of my findings and initial thoughts to clear my head and to see if any of y’all had any suggestions for directions I could fruitfully take my paper in. But as many of you have not got much of a background in the study of language, I thought I’d attach the following interview to serve as a sort of primer.
Some of the ideas I'm kicking around for my paper concern questions such as:
1. What is the relationship between "worldviews" and Biblical interpretation? Dr. McCartney argues in his essay on the NT's use of the OT that in order to be able to employ (not necessarily to understand) the Bible our worldview must be compatible with, although not necessarily identical with, the worldviews of the Biblical writers. One of the questions I would be trying to address is 'What constitutes compatibility between two worldviews?'
2. What is "Christian fundamentalism" and how does it affect the study of the Bible? I may just use my reflections on this question as a case study for working through question 1 above. Here I will try to interact with some of the major definitions of fundamentalism on offer (notably George Marsden's definition, "An evangelical who is angry about something," and Alvin Plantinga's definition, "A stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine" (I find both of these definitions somewhat wanting)), try to hammer out a definition of my own and attempt an analysis of the common patterns in fundamentalist Biblical interpretation using models from the philosophy of science (namely, the models offered by Imre Lakatos, Thomas Kuhn and Pierre Duhem).
3. What is the proper relationship between theology, Biblical scholarship and Christian Apologetics? This question too is connected with questions 1 and 2. This matter seems pressing to me because there is certainly a time for apologists to take up arms in defense of the faith against the deliverances of certain sectors of Biblical scholarship (e.g., the Jesus Seminar). But it is equally certain that at times apologists have taken up arms under the banner of defending the faith against genuine developments in understanding the Bible and have inadvertently done a disservice to the Church. Can these sorts of developments be avoided or are they just necessary growing pains?
4. Could God have given us an Bible written in a "perfect language" (i.e., a language that requires no context to be understood, is free of vagueness and ambiguity) and that could serve as an epistemic criterion or foundation (in the classical foundationalist sense)? I would want to run through some history of ideas and some thought-experiments to try to flesh some of my ideas on this question. Could an Edenic language have been a "perfect language"?
Let me know if you have any other ideas or if you think one of the above questions deserves more attention than the others.
Yep.... The picture on the left is my dad in his circa 1970's frat portrait and the picture on the right is me from this past Christmas. I hope I end up being like my dad in more than just looks....
