Joseph Brean - POSTMEDIA
“What’s In A Name? United Church Statements Of Faith Meet The Chicago Manual Of Style” is a pretty classic title for a presentation at the conference formerly known as the Learneds, the Superbowl of Canadian academia, which runs through next week.
© Provided by National Post
“What’s In A Name? United Church Statements Of Faith Meet The Chicago Manual Of Style” is a pretty classic title for a presentation at the conference formerly known as the Learneds, the Superbowl of Canadian academia, which runs through next week.
© Provided by National Post
Grammatical style can affect how people think of religious creeds, and therefore, in a sense, what they are, according to United Church minister William Haughton.
For many years, the National Post has reported on research presented to learned societies at this Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences with an eye to the unusual, such as the the social history of shawarma poutine, the oppressive nature of dodgeball in gym class and the mysterious death of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s best friend.
Next week, for example, a professor and two students will detail their findings on digital communication habits during the pandemic among the people of East York, a Toronto neighbourhood, a sort of taxonomy of lockdown phone users, from FaceTiming grandmas to millennial doom-scrollers.
This is the ivory tower’s big show, with scholarly updates on matters that are variously hilarious and intriguing, sometimes painfully relevant, such as a keynote address on how the pandemic harmed civil and political rights, but also sometimes gloriously irrelevant to anything but educated curiosity, such as the question of how to properly style a creed.
From sociology to Slavic studies, presenters are as diverse as eager young post-docs fishing for teaching jobs with choice selections from their research to a university professor who declined an interview because she is using the conference to promote a book that is not yet for sale and doesn’t want to spoil the marketing plan.
So this one, to be presented next week to the Canadian Society of Church History by a United Church minister and historian from Barrie, Ont., promises a similar frisson of offbeat curiosity. Here we have arcane subjects brought together in folksy academic style enlivened with vintage humour, first a familiar Shakespeare quote, then a Monty Python bit.
For many years, the National Post has reported on research presented to learned societies at this Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences with an eye to the unusual, such as the the social history of shawarma poutine, the oppressive nature of dodgeball in gym class and the mysterious death of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s best friend.
Next week, for example, a professor and two students will detail their findings on digital communication habits during the pandemic among the people of East York, a Toronto neighbourhood, a sort of taxonomy of lockdown phone users, from FaceTiming grandmas to millennial doom-scrollers.
This is the ivory tower’s big show, with scholarly updates on matters that are variously hilarious and intriguing, sometimes painfully relevant, such as a keynote address on how the pandemic harmed civil and political rights, but also sometimes gloriously irrelevant to anything but educated curiosity, such as the question of how to properly style a creed.
From sociology to Slavic studies, presenters are as diverse as eager young post-docs fishing for teaching jobs with choice selections from their research to a university professor who declined an interview because she is using the conference to promote a book that is not yet for sale and doesn’t want to spoil the marketing plan.
So this one, to be presented next week to the Canadian Society of Church History by a United Church minister and historian from Barrie, Ont., promises a similar frisson of offbeat curiosity. Here we have arcane subjects brought together in folksy academic style enlivened with vintage humour, first a familiar Shakespeare quote, then a Monty Python bit.
Creeds are a tricky business.
They are not simply statements of belief or faith. They are political documents, historically contingent. This is as true for the Nicene Creed, which was drafted to settle a fourth century political controversy in the Byzantine empire about how Jesus relates to God, as it is for the four major statements of faith adopted by the United Church of Canada in the 20th century.
William Haughton, the minister who has just published the scholarly book The Search for a Symbol: A New Creed and the United Church of Canada, explains one problem he encountered in his writing by recalling Juliet’s question, about Romeo: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
Her idea is that names could have been otherwise, but she applies this idea with an unstated premise, that the named thing would still be the same, like the smell of a rose. Is that true, though? Do names do nothing? Might Romeo have become a different person with a different name?
Juliet’s premise ignores the possibility of “nominative determinism,” a semi-serious hypothesis that people turn out like their name suggests, like the sprinter Usain Bolt, or the press secretary for the International Association of Fire Fighters, Tim Burn. More than just funny coincidences, this theory posits an actual causal relationship.
There’s a similar thing going on with creeds, according to Haughton. How scholars refer to creeds in print can affect how people think of them, and therefore, in a sense, what they are. Even something as simple as capitalization can carry vast connotations and implicit judgments about how popular, important and revered a religious statement seems to be. Style, he says, can affect substance.
This curious dynamic came up as he tried to write his book according to the gold standard for proper scholarly writing, The Chicago Manual of Style.
So how do you write the name of a creed? Italics? Quotes? Capitals?
The Search for A Symbol by William Haughton.
Those seemed to be the basic options, but choosing one got surprisingly tricky. There is no consistency in the existing literature. Other scholars have used every option and then some.
Haughton and his publisher had encountered what his paper describes as “unique ambiguities within this admittedly niche subject-area.”
Aha! A pitch-perfect paper for the Learneds.
Chicago says creeds, like named prayers, are “usually capitalized.” It’s the “usually” that is the problem.
“The question is inevitably raised about their renown: are they well-enough known to be treated stylistically as, say, the Shema, the Sermon on the Mount or the Nicene Creed?” Haughton writes.
Chicago calls for italics for titles of “major or freestanding works such as books, journals, movies, and paintings” but it wants quotations for “titles of subsections of larger works.”
On the other hand, it wants names of scriptures “and other highly revered works” to be capitalized “but not usually italicized (except when used in the title of a published work).”
So, is A New Creed “highly revered” and thus capitalized, or is it a freestanding work that wants italics, or is it is a sub-section of a larger work that calls for quotes?
Haughton is not the first person to inquire so deeply into the theological meaning of grammatical style. He referred, for example, to the New Testament scholar N. T. Wright, who prefers not to capitalize the G in “God,” not out of “deliberate irreverence,” but because the modern style of using “God” as if it is a proper name rather than a common noun is dangerous, and arguably implies both monotheism, which is not always the case, and that all monotheists recognize the same deity, which they do not.
In the end, Haughton submitted his manuscript using capitals, but his publisher decided the best stylistic choice was to also put them in quotes.
“I was OK with it,” he said.
“The consideration of such stylistic questions invites, for both United Church participants and observers alike, some surprisingly substantive reflection on what kinds of documents these statements of faith are,” Haughton writes. “This may not be earth shattering news, but it is interesting.”
For this Congress, that’s the sweet spot.
Congress is open for registration at www.federationhss.ca , with the promo code TRANSITIONS2022.
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