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Faiths in Their Pronouns
Websites of Identity

Kenneth Cragg
Kenneth Cragg was first in Jerusalem in 1939, and subsequently became deeply involved in areas of faith between Semitic religions under the stress of current politics. He later pursued doctoral studies in Oxford where he first graduated and became ‘Prizeman’ in Theology and Moral Philosophy, and where he is now an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College. He was a Bishop in the Anglican Jurisdiction in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Middle East, and played ecclesiastical roles in Africa and India. A Certain Sympathy of Scriptures is a companion book to his Readings in the Qur’an (1988; 1999), and more broadly to Faiths in Their Pronouns. Other works by Bishop Cragg, and published by Sussex Academic Press, include: With God in Human Trust – Christian Faith and Contemporary Humanism; The Weight in the Word – Prophethood, Biblical and Quranic; and The Education of Christian Faith.

The pronoun is the very mother tongue of thought. Family and race, nation and society, the clamant “us” and “ours” of collectives, resolve into “I” and singular “You”, the transacting pronouns of all human discourse. “Pro-nouns” are well styled, for they function on behalf of rights, claims, dignities and demands. Acquisitive and discursive, they transact the business of existence. It follows that pronouns are the essence of religion: their usages dictate the liability of religious faith. Their handling is a sure clue to the idiom of creed or ritual.
… If the web is society, then the speaking faiths of pronouns – I, we, us, ours, they, thou, you, them – come into their own in our keyboard encounters. Extending the metaphor, the net allows pronouns to intercept meaning, and to substitute for lack of clarity in argument and understanding. Insofar as “religions as grammars” provides a proper analogy, Faiths in Their Pronouns aims to explore their pronounal internet in hope of wiser courtesy and surer mutual discovery, a hope that is well captured in the face and hands of Raphael’s etching.

Chapter One The House of My Pilgrimage Chapter Two The Personal Interrogative – Arjuna and the Gita Chapter Three “So Help Me – Who?” Chapter Four Pronounal Jewry – God’s Own People Chapter Five The Self-Encounter in Judaism Chapter Six The Muslim Personal Pronoun Singular Chapter Seven The Muslim Personal Pronoun Plural Chapter Eight The “We” and the “I” in the New Testament Chapter Nine Two Great Sexes Animate the World Chapter Ten Our Dividual Being – The Irony of Mystical Union Chapter Eleven Faiths’ Pronoun-Users Now Notes Index of Names and Terms Index of Themes Biblical Passages Quranic Passages
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