You're listening to the Bible for Normal People, the only God-ordained podcast on the internet.

Serious talk about the Sacred Book. I'm Pete Ends.

And I'm Jared Byeth.

Welcome everybody to this episode of the Bible for Normal People.

Our guest today is Jonathan Merritt.

And we're going to be talking about reimagining sacred speech.

Jonathan Merritt is well known to a lot of us.

I'm sure he is a very prolific religion and culture writer.

He's won all sorts of awards.

Published probably thousands of articles in places like USA Today and Buzzfeed, Washington Post, New York Times.

So he's been around. He's a real thinker who lives in New York City and is thinking a lot about religion and culture and how to move forward.

Yeah. And if you've actually, I'm going to just promote the book here that he wrote,

learning to speak God from scratch, why sacred words are vanishing and how we can revive them.

We talk about some of that in this episode since we were talking about reimagining sacred speech.

And he's a researcher and I appreciate that in a lot of what he talks about, you know, you can tell he's...

He's read a ton.

Yeah, absolutely.

And he's done research and has specific statistics and anecdotes and all kinds of things that really, I think, help his point come alive.

And he drives his point home in a good way, which is that language changes.

And in America, spiritual language, religious language is dying.

A part of it is because we've gotten into this habit of calcifying or fossilizing language and thinking that it has this fixed meaning.

And being afraid of transforming it, reimagining it.

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