by Brian Volck | Dec 28, 2017 | Uncategorized
The power of language can be directed toward many ends. One of these ends is yet another form of power: political control. In egregious cases, language is openly manipulated, degraded, and deformed. Politically-motivated language distortion, however, is rarely so...
by Brian Volck | Dec 27, 2017 | Uncategorized
To call contemporary political discourse “a culture of lies” may be giving politicians, promoters, and pundits too much credit. When words, whether by choice or convention, are detached from shared experience or verifiable reality, speech devolves into amusing games...
by Brian Volck | Dec 26, 2017 | Uncategorized
Words, like quantum particles, will not be pinned down. However meticulously you fix them in the arc of a sentence, they quiver and jump the moment you turn away. They’re fickle and unruly even when you care what – and how – they mean. It’s this quantum uncertainty...
by Brian Volck | Dec 25, 2017 | words
Καὶ ὁ Λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο καὶ ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡμῖνThe word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. (John 1:14) Christmas, 2017, a celebration of “the Word made flesh,” arrives even as the degradation of our discourse – the way we talk to one another – accelerates....
by Brian Volck | Aug 2, 2017 | Uncategorized
I read the following post at the Glen Workshop, on August 1, 2017. The essay originally appeared in the Good Letters blog associated with IMAGE magazine in June, 2010, under the title, “The Mutt and Me.” “Jaeger,” the dog mentioned...
