Bible beyond fundamentalism and Islamic critique

My encounter with Islam has taught me to view the Bible differently (although still Christianly) than how I'd come to see it through Christian nurture previously. i would say it spurred me, perhaps, to see the Christian Scriptures more in the way that Brian McLaren and Steve Chalke have recently been saying.

So what did my encounter with Islam teach me? Well, there are a few incidents and some thinking.  One of the incidents was in the mid 1990's when  a young Muslim man, clearly wanting to try out his latest apologetic strategy on a Christian  told me that the Bible couldn't be the word of God because some of it is addressed to God and other parts are clearly not really God speaking in the first person. At least the Qu'ran has the vrctue of appearing to be God addressing humans. At the time we didn't have time to go into it further. What went through my head was that this was a fundamental misunderstanding of what Christians mean when we talk about the Bible as word of God in a way that includes greater co-operation between human processes and God's desire to communicate. And I nearly said to him something like 'Don't you think after thousands of years that we haven't thought of that and have a way of thinking about it that makes sense of that?' -really I was wanting to signal that what he seemed to think was a match-winner point was only the beginning of a conversation and that he should perhaps consider that obvious issues like that would have been considered in the Christian traditions of thinking about Christian Scripture.



However, of course, that incident does put a question mark against a quasi-islamic understanding of the Bible which sometimes it seem that Christian fundamentalists have and i think that, in some ways, is indeed vulnerable to the rhetorical point made by Muslim apologetics of the sort just mentioned.



For me it started to make me clear that Christians really don't think of the Bible as God addressing humans directly. Now there's a whole world of important difference in the theologies of revelation between the two faiths. Christianity is much more 'incarnational' -even fundamentalists when it comes down to it will root their defense of the Bible as God's words in the term 'inspiration' rather than dictation. 'Men, carried along by the Spirit...' 'God-breathed' are the kinds of phrases picked up from Scripture to think about what the relationship between God and Bible is: it is something which involves humans more than taking dictation but is a process where something of the personality of the writers or the signs of developmental processes can be discerned. This complements theological understandings of God working through and in human beings, inviting us to be part of what God is about.



But there are a couple of further developments. One of those was the realisation that many Muslims tend to regard the Qur'an (or at least a heavenly antetype the Umm al-Kitab, 'mother of the book') as something that has eternally existed with God. I think i owe this insight to Kenneth Cragg. In Islam the Word of God that is eternally with God is made recitation/book. In Christian faith the Word of God that is eternally with God is made flesh. In other words where Muslims have Book, we have Christ. This made it clear to me that it is really quite significant that in Christian faith the Word of God is first, foremost and importantly a Person. Enter Karl Barth into my thinking: therefore it really is so that Scripture bears witness to the Word of God, that is Christ. In Muslim terms, Christian Scriptures are more like reliable Hadith -stories about what the prophet said and did which help Muslims to understand what the Qur'an says and means. These Christian 'hadith' are souped up with the work of God's Spirit.



As a result of this, i started to feel that the liturgical practice of my church (Anglican) gained new resonance for me. When we hear Scripture read in Communion services, we sit to hear most readings but stand to hear the Gospels -some churches even have extra ceremonial to prepare for the reading and for the announcement of the Gospel including parading the book of the Gospels to the centre of the congergation where everyone turns to face it (the book is our qiblah). By these actions we are telling ourselves and honouring the fact that Christ in the centre of our faith; the means by which we are most directly addressed, personally (that is 'in person'), by God. The Gospels are the witnesses closest in to the Word of God.



Steve Chalke wrote:

"We do not believe that the Bible is 'inerrant' or 'infallible' in any popular understanding of these terms. In truth, there is nothing in the biblical texts that is beyond debate and questioning, and healthy churches are ones that create an environment which welcomes just that. The biblical texts are not a 'divine monologue', where the solitary voice of God dictates a flawless and unified declaration of his character and will to their writers." 

 So we would not want to think about the Bible as the Word of God -for that is Christ, but rather as word of God: witness and testimony to enable us to understand the Word of God. Witness and testimony that God has nurtured (by the action of the Holy Spirit) to be good enough to do the job of forming us in the way of Christ ('... useful for correcting, rebuking, teaching and training in righteousness ... equipped for every good work').



By the witness of these same scriptures, words like 'inerrant' or 'infallible' can only properly be understood in relation to whether they mean the ability of Scripture to lead us rightly to being trained in righteousness and being equipped to practice love in the way of Christ.



The biblical cat is out of the f - Brian McLaren:q

Church Engagement and its discontents

I have to confess that in the past, enthralled by leadership teaching and church growth and management insights and still not having fully and properly co-ordinated the secular management insights with theological reflection, I recall having similar niggles to those mentioned in this insightful article:

 weary of such teaching as we realised that it didn’t really resonate with the picture we see in Jesus who would not only ‘lay down his life’ for his sheep but would willingly leave the ninety-nine in order to find the individual who had become lost.

 This was a propos of teaching about leaving behind those in a church who weren't buying into the leaders' vision. This, of course, comes out of reifying the vision into, in effect, the very word of the Lord. Yet what had always troubled me was the way the there was so little in Scripture about vision casting. About the only text is the Proverbs verse 'Where there is no vision the people perish' -which only works in the AV 'translation' and seems to actually yield very little backing for vision casting. in fact, the Pauline and Johanine exhortations to unity  would seem to count against 'leaving behind' or, in effect, excluding those who don't 'catch' the vision. And, of course. the parable of the lost sheep is rightly brought to the bar above.



What this piece does rather well is to pick up and explain in churchly terms the basic three stages of church engagement -drawn from observation of organisational life (and which I'm adding to my reflections on being part of a university which is morphing into a self-aware business). The suggestion is also that expecting an ever upward engagement is cutting against the grain of a natural human engagement entropy:

suggest that there exists an organisational entropy when it comes to a
person’s engagement to a group, community, or vision.  Most of the
models that I have seen explaining how to secure human engagement tend
to paint a picture of an onward and upward journey toward increased
adherence. I am not sure that this is either possible, or even perhaps
desirable.


I would want to suggest a three-phase journey experienced within a community:


1) Enthusiastic

2) Realistic

3) Apathetic

- See more at:
http://www.redletterchristians.org/three-phases-church-engagement/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+RedLetterChristians+%28Red+Letter+Christians%29&utm_content=Netvibes#sthash.mj0PAxL0.dpu

... there exists an organisational entropy when it comes to a person's engegement to a group, community or vision. ... a three-phase journey experienced within a community:

1) Enthusiastic

2)Realistic

3) Apathetic

In each of these phases there are not only normal and expected patterns and psychodynamics of engagement (all of which are perfectly recognisable and understandable from our own experiences) but also tend to be exploited or drawn on by leaders in certain ways. We can also see these phase at work when people buy new products -and we may be aware of how the company that supplies it is really keen to get us to give re-usable feedback in the first few days of ownership -when we're still enthusiastic about it and before 'reality' sets in in the form of us having found that it doesn't actually change our life as much for the better as we thought it might or its downsides start to become apparent and a certain disillusion sets in. And of course it may only be a matter of time before we become non-users -apathetic, looking for something better or at least simply instrumental about it. Similarly with churches -doubly so if they are 'marketed' with visions, missions and vibe. So people drop out or move on from one church to another.



Accordingly, we need to teach leadership skills not just to do the first phase stuff but to pastor through phases 2 and 3. Informally this already happens, of course, we all know churches that do phase 1 stuff really well but have open back doors as well as front doors. Many of us are also aware of churches which tend to 'receive' at least some of the refugees from phase 1 churches, and some of us know people who don't reconnect with church. I'm also aware of some people who don't connect with phase 1 churches at all because they at a subliminal level understand only too well the marketing dynamic of the vibe and vision thing and shy away from the 'machine' that threatens to eat them.



So the question is not only how do we train priests to be leaders for all three phases, but how do we disciple Christians to work through them maturely (and are 'sabbaticals' part of this)? And that latter question morphs into a question about how we build church life so as not to be using up the first-phasers?



The fact is, I suspect, that churches that do phase one stuff well are doing so parasitically on the rest of the body of Christ: using up people's enthusiasm and 'letting them go' when they realise that all is not as shiney as it first seemed: then other churches pick them up and sometimes help put them back together. Sometimes, of course, no church is trusted thereafter. We badly need phase-ecumenism in order to cope with this natural life staging under our current 'system' -but it would be hard for many leaders to do this as it would mean admitting a certain relativity or contingency to their self-perceptions of ministry, theology and mission. Meanwhile the mission of the whole church is compromised.



I hope I'm wrong, but I fear i'm not.

there
exists an organisational entropy when it comes to a person’s engagement
to a group, community, or vision.  Most of the models that I have seen
explaining how to secure human engagement tend to paint a picture of an
onward and upward journey toward increased adherence. I am not sure that
this is either possible, or even perhaps desirable. - See more at:
http://www.redletterchristians.org/three-phases-church-engagement/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+RedLetterChristians+%28Red+Letter+Christians%29&utm_content=Netvibes#sthash.mj0PAxL0.dpuf

there
exists an organisational entropy when it comes to a person’s engagement
to a group, community, or vision.  Most of the models that I have seen
explaining how to secure human engagement tend to paint a picture of an
onward and upward journey toward increased adherence. I am not sure that
this is either possible, or even perhaps desirable. - See more at:
http://www.redletterchristians.org/three-phases-church-engagement/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+RedLetterChristians+%28Red+Letter+Christians%29&utm_content=Netvibes#sthash.mj0PAxL0.dpuf

suggest
that there exists an organisational entropy when it comes to a person’s
engagement to a group, community, or vision.  Most of the models that I
have seen explaining how to secure human engagement tend to paint a
picture of an onward and upward journey toward increased adherence. I am
not sure that this is either possible, or even perhaps desirable.


I would want to suggest a three-phase journey experienced within a community:


1) Enthusiastic

2) Realistic

3) Apathetic




- See more at:
http://www.redletterchristians.org/three-phases-church-engagement/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+RedLetterChristians+%28Red+Letter+Christians%29&utm_content=Netvibes#sthash.mj0PAxL0.dpuf

suggest that there exists an organisational entropy when it comes to a
person’s engagement to a group, community, or vision.  Most of the
models that I have seen explaining how to secure human engagement tend
to paint a picture of an onward and upward journey toward increased
adherence. I am not sure that this is either possible, or even perhaps
desirable.


I would want to suggest a three-phase journey experienced within a community:


1) Enthusiastic

2) Realistic

3) Apathetic

- See more at:
http://www.redletterchristians.org/three-phases-church-engagement/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+RedLetterChristians+%28Red+Letter+Christians%29&utm_content=Netvibes#sthash.mj0PAxL0.dpuf

suggest that there exists an organisational entropy when it comes to a
person’s engagement to a group, community, or vision.  Most of the
models that I have seen explaining how to secure human engagement tend
to paint a picture of an onward and upward journey toward increased
adherence. I am not sure that this is either possible, or even perhaps
desirable.


I would want to suggest a three-phase journey experienced within a community:


1) Enthusiastic

2) Realistic

3) Apathetic

- See more at:
http://www.redletterchristians.org/three-phases-church-engagement/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+RedLetterChristians+%28Red+Letter+Christians%29&utm_content=Netvibes#sthash.mj0PAxL0.dpuf

suggest that there exists an organisational entropy when it comes to a
person’s engagement to a group, community, or vision.  Most of the
models that I have seen explaining how to secure human engagement tend
to paint a picture of an onward and upward journey toward increased
adherence. I am not sure that this is either possible, or even perhaps
desirable.


I would want to suggest a three-phase journey experienced within a community:


1) Enthusiastic

2) Realistic

3) Apathetic

- See more at:
http://www.redletterchristians.org/three-phases-church-engagement/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+RedLetterChristians+%28Red+Letter+Christians%29&utm_content=Netvibes#sthash.mj0PAxL0.dpuf

suggest that there exists an organisational entropy when it comes to a
person’s engagement to a group, community, or vision.  Most of the
models that I have seen explaining how to secure human engagement tend
to paint a picture of an onward and upward journey toward increased
adherence. I am not sure that this is either possible, or even perhaps
desirable.


I would want to suggest a three-phase journey experienced within a community:


1) Enthusiastic

2) Realistic

3) Apathetic

- See more at:
http://www.redletterchristians.org/three-phases-church-engagement/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+RedLetterChristians+%28Red+Letter+Christians%29&utm_content=Netvibes#sthash.mj0PAxL0.dpuf

 The Three Phases of Church Engagement | Alan Molineaux | Red Letter Christians:

Prepare kids to be billionaires?

I get updates of questions from Quora -they are often interesting questions and sometimes the answers are knockout. I found that this question What are good ways to prepare my kids to be billionaires? And it stuck with me. i must confess that some of it was because I was really disturbed by it. I bespoke unaware entitlement (though I may be wrong) and a load of assumptions that really need unpicking.



So I found myself commenting:

Bigger questions: why would you think they would become billionaires?
And what is it about being a billionaire that you covet (for them)? Why
is that the measure of whether you have helped bring a wonderful human
being into the world?



I ask these further question because there are 7bn people on the planet.
Millions of them have the qualities necessary but only a very small
amount of the total potential billionaires have actually achieved that
potential. Why? -we should perhaps recognise that it is mostly good
fortune that makes a billionaire: the good fortune to have social,
financial and political capital that can be leveraged and to be in the
right place at the right time.



Our problem is confirmation bias -we see the already successful but
discount their failures on the way and see them as if their 'success'
was inevitable. We *don't* see the thousands just as 'worthy' who happen
not to have had the happy combination of factors come together for
them. To prepare kids to be billionaires they have to be prepared not to
be: to fail: character  such as humility , empathy, no sense of
entitlement, generosity etc are never going to go wrong.



Also, why would you think that your own efforts to hothouse your
children might not backfire? Better to put more effort into making the
world one where more of the billions can be heirs to a better chance to
make more than a dollar a day. In building a world like that we make a
safer world for all our children.

 What I didn't write because I thought it was even more likely to draw trolls was that, in fact, too often billionaires become rentiers and end up in rent-seeking behaviour; in effect by occupying certain critical/strategic positions in the political-economic complex they accrue money for doing, in actuality, nothing and they accrue money by denuding others of opportunity or  even the means of proper livelihood. To prepare a child to be a billionaire -even if this were a sure thing- must, morally, surely, involve helping them to recognise that they would have huge debts to society and good fortune which should be given back (I'm not saying they don't have some kind of right to enjoy the fruits of their genuine labours). That no-one actually needs (or really deserves) that amount of money and that holding onto it is actually clinging to power to continue to exploit without work or effort -'rent seeking behaviour'.



The obverse of this is to think more about the normal fact of life for 'successful' entrepreneurs: failure is rife before, for a small percentage of them, they get a big break. Commonly this may involve 'betting the farm' on something: it's about risk. So, if we want a society where people can have a go at 'making it big' we need to make sure we have a society which looks out for the losers (some of whom may become 'winners' one day): we need 'safety nets' and the means to put people back on their feet -because not everyone can be billionaires -or the inflation would make the 'admiration' connoted in the term obsolete.



(2) What are good ways to prepare my kids to be billionaires? - Quora:

Cosmos Reborn : Happy Theology on the New Creation -some reactions.

Well, it had me intrigued, the title and the blurb:

 Need a religious detox? Have a dose of happy theology! Good news to liberate your life. Though we opposed Him as "enemies in our minds," God never set Himself against us as our enemy. Adam was breathed from the very life of God, and it has always been the Creator's intent to restore humanity to the bliss and immortality of its divine origin. In the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God included you and absorbed the entire created order into Himself, bringing an end to decay and corruption. Mortality has been swallowed up by immortality 

 In part because it  seemed to promise some exploration of things I'd been considering lately and also because it seemed to be promising that it would be based in some 'respectable' theology. I like the way that the book quotes and uses the ideas of theologians like Gregory of Nyssa, Origen, Clement of Alexandria and modern ones like Torrance and Barth. This list might rightly give the impression that there is a strong Trinitarian focus to the theology. The author, John Crowder, confesses himself to be a fan of such theology though with the disclaimer that he may not always pass it on so well. And to be fair there were one or two points when I felt that he fell of the theological wagon but overall the thrust was fairly consistent and sustained.

One of the things I enjoyed also was someone quite obviously formed in the pente-charismatic end of US Evangelicalism 'selling' Orthodox theology like theopoiesis and doing so in a style that would probably connect with that constituency. Even to the point of using the language of prosperity teaching -which was frankly a bit disturbing though a hint here and there that it is nuanced in such a way as to avoid the excesses of that kind of teaching (though not enough that I felt entirely sure of that)

The main theses being promoted are an exposition of the theological implications of God being love and that we are loved from eternity. In the process he does a take-down of popular excesses in the relating of penal substititionary atonement, the misconceived understandings of God's wrath and the general grumpiness of the way that popular American Evangelicalism portrays God. And he's right to do all of those things.

Just sometimes I felt he got carried away with his own rhetoric and so seemed to fall into the 'rebound' effect of argumentation (you know, trying to state something against an error so strongly that you end up appearing to endorse something equally erroneous the other way) -though there are little bits that indicate these are flights of rhetoric. A notable place where this happens is in the treatment of anger where he manages to calm the rhetoric to note that love implies anger in some circumstances and he probably does so in a way that overall gets the balance right on that.

I found myself speed-reading some sections, and asked myself why. What i realised was that there was a lot of familiarity on my part with the broad line of argument being made and that I was getting impatient with the preacherly voice of delivery in the text which battered at me: 'I know, I get it; now can we get on with the next point?' captures my inner reaction.

The thing I'd probably want to explore with him, if I got a chance, would be how -given the hammering home of the finished work of Christ- we are actually to understand continuing bad behaviour and bad attitudes in Christians. Sometimes it almost seemed that he'd slipped into transcendentalism and was singing Mary Baker Eddy's tunes.

Amazon.com: Cosmos Reborn : Happy Theology on the New Creation eBook: John Crowder: Kindle Store:


Cosmos Reborn -- Amazon
Cosmos Reborn -- Book Trailer
John Crowder -- Main site (Sons of Thunder)
John Crowder -- Fan page on Facebok

#SpeakeasyCosmosReborn

Trusting the poor with the money

This article Why we should give free money to everyone, shook me because it made me realised that I too tended to accept that just giving people money to help them is an invitation to abuse.

 The trend from 'welfare' to 'workfare' is international, with obligatory job applications, reintegration trajectories, mandatory participation in 'voluntary' work. The underlying message: Free money makes people lazy.

Except that it doesn’t.

The article shows how poor people all over the world can do great things with money if they're given it -and it's better than what well-meaning and even well-researched aid workers might do. And from my experience of having little money, it makes sense: it is frustrating to see how ones lack of money shuts someone out from economies of scale, helpful social networks, time-saving, training and so on. Having enough money -that is access to power to be an agent in ones own life and in community with others. So,

Proven correlations exist between free money and a decrease in crime,
lower inequality, less malnutrition, lower infant mortality and teenage
pregnancy rates, less truancy, better school completion rates, higher
economic growth and emancipation rates. ‘The big reason poor people are
poor is because they don’t have enough money’, economist Charles Kenny, a
fellow at the Center for Global Development, dryly remarked last June.
‘It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that giving them money is a great
way to reduce that problem.’

 There's actually a virtuous circle as readers of The Spirit Level might just suspect. Add to that the costs of giving aid and there is more 'bang for your buck'.

Why would we send well-paid foreigners in SUVs when we could just give
cash? This would also diminish risk of corrupt officials taking their
share. Free money stimulates the entire economy: consumption goes up,
resulting in more jobs and higher incomes.

Only problem is that our assumption that people will waste money is so strongly ingrained that it's a hard sell. And it's an assumption that is based more on repetition than on self-reflection. Because, if we reflect (most of us, anyway) on what we would do with, say, three grand when we had nothing, we know, most of us, that we would want to 'invest' our money for the longer term and to make it go as far as possible. We'd want to use it to enable us to have a regular income and to feel like worthwhile members of society. So why do we think that others are so different from us?



And indeed, I would go with the next move in the article I've been citing:

A monthly allowance, enough to live off, without any outside control
on whether you spend it well or whether you even deserve it. No jungle
of extra charges, benefits, rebates - all of which cost tons to
implement. At most with some extras for the elderly, unemployed and
disabled.



The basic income - it is an idea whose time has come.

 Now I've known about basic income for a long while -it's been Green Party policy since the 1970s (when it was the Ecology Party) and I wrote one of my first practical theology papers in 1982 on unemployment in which one of the conclusions was that a citizen's income would be theologically justified. What i didn't know until this article is that there had been a real-life experiment in Canada which was cancelled for political reasons with the data unanalysed until recently. And the results are conversant with what we would probably predict for ourselves on reflection on ourselves rather than on presuming on the actions and attitudes of other people (hooking our 'us and them' negativity).

‘Politicians feared that people would stop working, and that they
would have lots of children to increase their income,’ professor Forget says.










You can find one of her lectures here.

Yet the opposite happened: the average marital age went up while
the birth rate went down. The Mincome cohort had better school
completion records. The total amount of work hours decreased by only
13%. Breadwinners hardly cut down on their hours, women used the basic
income for a couple of months of maternity leave and young people used
it to do some extra studying. Forget’s most remarkable discovery is that hospital visits went down by 8,5%.

 The article goes on to consider whether it would be affordable -it sounds like it would be so expensive. But then again ....

It would allow us to cut most of the benefits and supervision programs
that the current social welfare system necessitates. Many tax rebates
would be redundant. Further financing could come from (higher) taxing of
capital, pollution and consumption. [...] Holland, has 16.8 million inhabitants. Its poverty line is set at $1,300
a month. This would make for a reasonable basic income. Some simple
math would set the cost on 193.5 billion euro annually, about 30% of our
national GDP. That’s an astronomically high figure. But remember: the
government already controls more than half of our GDP. It does not keep
the Netherlands from being one of the richest, most competitive and
happiest countries in the world.

 Remember too, that such a policy would mean that employers would offer wages over and above a basic income -reducing their direct wage bills. Also the apparatus of control, surveillance and processing of social security would be hugely reduced. And if the Mincome experiment panned out, health costs would be likely to fall somewhat. I could see it making an interesting difference to education -what price student loans with less living costs needed?

Worth thinking about, surely?

PS. this RSA video with Daniel Pink showcasing research on motivations raises the tantalising possibility that a basic income could be the most creative and liberating thing we could do with our society.

I'm sorry for the late running of this service

I've noticed a few times in the last year or three that announcements at some rail stations and on some trains have surprised me a little with their automated announcements which apologise for delays or other inconveniences in the service. I guess I have tended to expect -because it would be what i'd do- that they might say things like, "Broad Acres Railways regrets any inconvenience ..." but what catches me by suprise is the first person singular: "I apologise" or "I am sorry ....".

Perhaps it doesn't strike you as odd, but for me there are two questions spring to mind. One question is, knowing that it is an automated announcement, who is this 'I'? And the second question is, assuming that somehow it is the company being represented, how seriously can we take expressions of regret, remorse or penitence on the part of a company?

With regard to  who the 'I' might be, the recording carries the trace of a real human 'I' who is/was the voice actor who recorded the various components that the computer algorithm uses to assemble the panoply of announcements. Clearly that person is not apologising, it is merely their voice that has been rented to express some other's messages. However, what their voice does is to give an illusion of a human subject making the apology (or whatever else it might be) and presumably the company is interested in the sense of rapport that this creates in their customers, establishing a friendly, humane, presence in our psyches.

So the literal or direct referent for the 'I' could be the algorithm that generates the messages in response to whatever inputs to the computer system that is running the program that the algorithm is part of. The "I' in this case is the output of data processing -though that might, in a wider context, be too reductionistic a statement: just because this 'I' is produced most proximately by loudspeakers driven by electrical signals which are patterned in turn by a computer algorithm, does not mean that the 'I' so produced is meaningless in the sense of there being no person 'behind' it. If we adhere too strongly to that, then we risk denying personal meaningfulness behind the output of the voice synthesiser used by Stephen Hawking. Come to that, we could notice that our own voice production is in many ways a biological reflex of the electro-mechanical systems just mentioned: we have neuronal patterns which perform a similar function to the computer algorithm in respect of producing syntactically and phonologically (though often not prosodically) well-formed utterances and translate those into speech.

Now, thinking about the corporate expressing regret etc, it is tempting to deny personal meaningfulness to the train or station announcement on behalf of Broad Acres Railway Company but we might want to pause. Is it possible that a company could desire, intend, regret? And could it do those things at least in part in relation to human persons?

We readily acknowledge, of course, that those who lead the company may have desires, intents and relational-motives in common. We can acknowledge that more lowly members of the company might also do those things on a one-to-one level (though it's an interesting question to wonder how far they might do so in their own persons and how for as representative persons -or if that is a meaningful distinction). And the question is whether that is all that there is to say: a bunch of individual humans happen to agree that it is regrettable that the train is late or whatever. Or is it possible that it is more than an aggregated, collective, emotion? That, at least sometimes, the company is a collective being-in-itself and capable of something analogous to human emotions like desire, fear, anger, loyalty?

This would mean that in some way the confluence of legal instruments, financial flows, contracts, mission statements, human affectivity (of a variety of 'stakeholders') become synchronised and feedback-reinforced such that while the machinery, software and human agents which form the infrastructure are in place 'performing' the company, then the company is real and has some degree of agency. It impinges on the human social world as an actor with analogues to personality (ethos?), intentions (mission statement and other direction-setting instruments) and a certain degree of vulnerability to what others 'think' of it (reputation, image, brand etc).

What makes it hard for us to go with that is often that we are tripped up by the fact that a company (or whatever) is made up of human beings and we are by instinct and habit disposed to relate to other humans. We can accommodate, usually by analogy, 'lesser' creatures into our relating or we can treat things as mere instruments of our will. What we are less equipped to do is to relate to something that is made from us and which might use our intelligence and affectivity as part of its own life -a little like our brains use the electro-chemical and biological capabilities of the cells we call neurons which go about their own business but collectively help create a mind. And of course, such a thing is so alien to what we are disposed to relate to and we have few everyday experiences on which to draw to give analogues which could help us.

So, I think it is possible that the 'I' can refer, at least sometimes, to a real entity which has agency and a 'self' to refer to within human language-games. We actually do refer to companies in an agentive way at times: "the college should know..."; "that company thinks it can ..." etc are all acceptable clause openings. The issue in interpreting them is more to do with whether the company or the college or the organisation is being personified or whether there is something more to it than merely a way of speaking.

I started writing this thinking I might be producing something that might send-up the companies' affectation. I've ended by thinking it may be an affectation at the level of the commissioning group and the PR departments but that it might actually be accurate in a way.

Misrepresenting 2nd language speakers in fiction

I quite like Hercules Poirot, especially as played by David Suchet. However, I've not read the books so I'm not sure whether the 'Frenchisms' are a faithful reproduction of Agatha Christie's writing or not, but I suspect so. By 'Frenchisms' I mean things like :

Mon ami, what will you? You fix upon me a look of doglike devotion and demand of me a pronouncement a la Sherlock Holmes! Hercule Poirot

 In particular the use of phrases such as 'Mon ami' or even 'Oui'

It's not just Agatha Christie, there's a tendency in a lot of writers to insert words from a foreign language to show foreign-ness of a character. The problem I have with it, from informal observation of others and of my own performance in foreign language, is that the kinds of words and phrases that characters like Poirot are shown using are not the kind of phrases or words that we tend to use in second-languages. Why? Because they are the 'easy phrases' we learn first. The first-language phrases we are likely to carry into our second-language usage are the harder things where we may not know the word. A second-language speaker of English is more likely to say 'my friend' or 'yes' but say something like 'etage one' because they haven't learnt 'first floor' yet, than they are to pepper their English with simple common phrases drawn from their first language.

What we tend to see in these fictional cases is actually the knowledge of the writer of the 2nd language projected onto the foreign-language character, and if the writer is not really well-acquainted with the language in question, what they are likely to know are phrases that a beginner would have learned or (possibly) the stereotypical characterisations of other writers or storytellers. I would recommend that any writer wishing to push beyond stereotypes of speakers-of-English-as-second-language should go to a few classes where people are learning English and pay attention to the way that they are taught common phrases and drilled in frequently-used contstructions and can end up producing sentences which are 'close enough' concatenations of these rote-learnt phrases with vocabulary inserted. Reproducing that kind of thing would have much more verisimilitude as would including misunderstandings where the second-language user responds not quite appropriately because they haven't understood something about what has been said to them and produce an answer or response which is on more familar ground for them.