About this blog
Originally I called this blog Thoughts about faith, but Christian faith potentially embraces all dimensions of one’s life, so at least some of the things I had in mind are not about faith but about things on which faith has a bearing or which concern faith from various angles. Hence Thoughts around faith.
My memory is not as good as it used to be, so I like to write down various thoughts, along with notes on books I read. But sitting on a hard drive they aren’t much use to anyone, so I decided to turn some of them in this a blog. Like most blogs, this one consists mostly of posts. In some posts there are links to longer documents, mostly book notes, written mainly for my benefit: usually they are neither proper reviews nor proper summaries.
The photo on the home page of Tasmania’s Dove Lake and Cradle Mountain for me represents a small piece of God’s magificence in Australia.
NB The views I express in this blog are my own except where otherwise noted.
About me
I am Malcolm Ross, an emeritus professor in Linguistics at the Australian National University. Retirement (since 2008) has given me time to think more carefully about my faith as a follower of Jesus and to appreciate how amazing our God is.
Joyously married since 1965, Ingrid and I have two lovely children: a daughter and a son. Until recently the two of us have continued to travel within Australia and overseas, and I still do linguistic research alongside the things that result in this blog around things Christian.
Some readers may want to know what ‘brand’ of Christian I am. The simplest response: I believe in the content of the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed (but the charismatic evangelical congregation I belong to never recites them!). I am enthusiastic about writings by N.T. (Tom) Wright, Fleming Rutledge and Alister McGrath. And there’s more in my blog posts. Am I a fundamentalist? I rifled the Internet for descriptions and definitions, and found so many that the question is hardly meaningful. I can say that my reading of the creeds is not metaphorical.
But I must also say that for a linguist the concept of a ‘literal interpretation’ of the Bible (or anything else expressed in language) is incoherent, as language depends on the hearer or reader making inferences about what the speaker or writer means. This is true even before factoring in the circumstance that most Christians read a translation, with two layers of inference: the translator’s and the reader’s. But typically there is a ‘plain meaning’ on which a majority of translators and readers can agree, as long as they take the context into account.
In the US ‘evangelical’ seems now to be associated in the public eye with the political right wing, and this is coming to be so in Australia too, but I find myself wishing I could vote for a combination of policies drawn from Labor, the Liberals and the Greens, which I suppose puts me in the political middle. Above all I want to follow Jesus.
You can find a small website relating to my linguistic work and a short autobiography as a linguist here. My linguistics publications are listed in my curriculum vitae here).
I am on Twitter as @MalcolmBeatus (Latin beatus means ‘blessed’).