{"id":1463,"date":"2013-04-19T14:34:00","date_gmt":"2013-04-19T14:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/04\/what-am-i-supposed-to-call-god.html"},"modified":"2013-04-19T14:34:00","modified_gmt":"2013-04-19T14:34:00","slug":"what-am-i-supposed-to-call-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/04\/what-am-i-supposed-to-call-god.html","title":{"rendered":"What Am I Supposed To Call God?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

<\/p>\n

When I was a student at\u00a0Earlham School of Religion<\/a>, school policy was that in our written and oral contributions to our classes, worship and community life, we should do our best to use gender-inclusive language for God. In practical terms, this meant avoiding the personal pronoun\u00a0he<\/i>, usually simply replacing it with the word\u00a0God<\/i>. This language switch could get a little bit tricky, since standard English has some serious limitations when it comes to expressing a non-gendered personal entity. I remember that quite frequently I ended up writing and saying\u00a0godself\u00a0<\/i>\u2013 as in, \u201cGod is gathering a people to godself.\u201d Not exactly the most accessible language!<\/span><\/div>\n
Don\u2019t get me wrong; I am clear in my own mind that God is neither exclusively male nor female, and I have no desire to promote a worldview in which God\u2019s\u00a0feminine\u00a0<\/i>qualities are denigrated or ignored. While I was a student at ESR, and for years afterwards, I embraced gender-inclusive language wholeheartedly. In fact, hearing other Christians refer to God as\u00a0he\u00a0<\/i>really bothered me.<\/span><\/div>\n
Over time, however, I have begun to encounter serious problems with some of the attempts to make my language around God gender-neutral. The most obvious, of course, is the simple dilemma of using the English language in a way that sounds deeply unnatural to most folks. The word\u00a0godself\u00a0<\/i>is a seminary invention if there ever was one, and there seems little likelihood that this well-intentioned stopgap is going to catch on any time soon.<\/span><\/div>\n
Read the rest here<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was a student at\u00a0Earlham School of Religion, school policy was that in our written and oral contributions to our classes, worship and community life, we should do our best to use gender-inclusive language for God. In practical terms, this meant avoiding the personal pronoun\u00a0he, usually simply replacing it with the word\u00a0God. This language […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2251,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat Am I Supposed To Call God?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"When I was a student at Earlham School of Religion, school policy was that in our written and oral contributions to our classes, worship and\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/04\/what-am-i-supposed-to-call-god.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What Am I Supposed To Call God?\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"When I was a student at Earlham School of Religion, school policy was that in our written and oral contributions to our classes, worship and\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/04\/what-am-i-supposed-to-call-god.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Rhetoric Race and Religion\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2013-04-19T14:34:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Andre E. 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