Sustaining Theology: Personal Search to Public Research: Bible to Bibliography

Abstract

‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’ (Wittgenstein in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung. Keegan Paul, London, 1922/2010: 5.6). Rejecting bland multicultural theology, global frames analyse textual Products, interpret contextual/social Practices, critique Purposes. Chronological narratives integrate human streams of consciousness, coherently de-/re-constructing semantic triangles/semiotic trinities. No mere literary device, relating physics to metaphysics, binding anthropology to theology, ubiquitous metaphor pervades ‘Quantum consciousness’. Consistently scrutinised, metaphor can alter/altar consciousness, yielding fresh discourse—law, contract, policy and praxis—performative drama/dharma from kindergarten and ‘universe-city’ to oecumenical eudaimonia. Encapsulating Vedic/Buddhist/Taoist Critical Realism, Critical Theory, and Critical Discourse Studies, Cultural Historical Activity Theory proves an evaluative framework amidst bewildering multimodal globalisation. Crucial systemic, dialectic, heteroglossic, (w)holistic, transformational criteria probe assumptions and linguistic presuppositions. Systemic Functional Semiotics, Bakhtin’s claim, ‘the symbol has a warmth of fused mystery’, Jung’s ‘Modern Man in Search of a Soul’ associate atma, atomic energy, consilience, Eastern magi(c) deep in the Western psyche. Depth hermeneutics, distributed phonology and morphology, explain and enlighten discipleship. This presentation invites spiritual expansion, literate rather than literal reading of the wor(l)d beyond the word. It justifies specific pragmaticist strategies: spatio-temporal, sensorial, symbolic and material modalities discern, discriminate, define, divine and empower metaphysical Self, Soul, ‘that of Go(o)d’ in every being. Challenging global political-economy and cultural politics, 500+ teachers, teacher-educators, international-NGO administrators and academics in Britain and overseas evidenced empathic transformation.

Appendices

Appendix 1: Philosophy and Theory for Critical Global Educators

Appendix 2

Appendix 3: Halliday: Systemic Functional Semiotics Maureen Ellis

Analytical skills are crucial to democratic citizenship. Discourses unify and exclude. Dialectical, interactive, third-way political literacy can turn consumers into producers, distinguishing mere or manipulative rhetoric from deliberative discourse.

Halliday’s framework applies a metafunctional approach to languages, separating elements of Field, Tenor and Mode, setting ‘texts’ in contexts, where they combine to create semantic density. SFL helps trace meaning (movement)—C. S. Peirce’s iconic (denotation), indexical (association) and symbolic (connotation)-, and relates individual idiolect to public dialogue, variations in dialect and global dialectics. SFS has been used to read multimodal worlds of music, art, advertising, architecture, film, protest march and performance of daily-life drama.

Ideational

• Field in which the activity or content belongs; topic choice/drift;

• Participants: who or what—specificity or abstraction. Denotation/connotation; objectivation (e.g. ‘the prankster’); anonymised; aggregated;

• Processes: Transitivity/Intransitivity? Are activities described in material (e.g. throw), mental (e.g. believe), verbal (e.g. protest), or relational (e.g. be, have) terms?

• Circumstantial information provided (time, place, manner, cause, etc.);

• Lexis or vocabulary, the domain it represents, level of technical terminology, idiom, cliche.

Interpersonal

• Tenor or relationships between speaker or writer and the receiver of the communication or text; reporting verbs reveal attitude; gaze offers or demands information or goods/services.

• Mood: does the text use declarative, interrogative or imperative forms? To what purpose?

• Modality: degrees of probability (dynamic), obligation (deontic), certainty (epistemic), e.g. must, should, can, will…; hedging, disclaimers, mitigation;

• Polarity: positive or negative ideas? absent excluded actors/processes; omissions;

• Distance: point of view, camera angle, vulnerable or empowered; Turn-taking, -allocation;

• Vocation: terms of address, e.g. student, professionals, readers, Dear Sir, …;

• Person: first, second or third person, e.g. you, we, he, I, our, …; pose/posture/positioning;

• Speech function/performance: statements, invitations, warnings, offers, denial, complaint;

• Attitude: Intimacy, Intensity, Affect, stance, e.g. unfortunately, luckily, + adjectives.

Textual

• Mode and/or medium of communication, synchronic/diachronic coherence, cohesion, codes linking co-text to context; syntagmatic/paradigmatic choices; syntax (sentence structure).

• Theme/Rheme: structural arrangement, e.g. known to unknown, presumed/shared knowledge, familiar to new indicates assumptions, desired emphasis;

• Salience: foregrounding/focus/prominence: size, font, location/placement; colour saturation/purity/differentiation/hue, tone, brightness, music, sound fx, phonology, rhythm, stress, intonation, volume, exaggeration/hyperbole;

• Reference: sources, cultural symbols, linking, deixis, e.g. specific times, places, people;

• Framing: social distance, close/middle/long shot; frontal/oblique/high/low/eye level angle.

• Metaphor, metonymy (substitution, e.g. top brass); synechdoche (part/whole); symbolism.

• Conjunction: links of causality, time, contrasts, justifications versus factual statements categorically delivered indicate assumptions, i.e. epistemic vs deontic or boulomaic modality.

Discourse for Deliberative Democracy: Unlocking Cryptogrammar Maureen Ellis

• 1. Structural vs Discourse: A discourse approach to Language learning and teaching:

  • i. respects context, social relations, genre/hybridity, use over usage, agency, life;

  • ii. acknowledges ‘voice’, intertextuality, values, ethical, moral, social issues beneath dominant routines; distinguishes ‘dead’ texts, structures, mere rhetoric, from relevant, ‘live’, ‘open’ ‘texts’;

  • iii. skills communication: macro top-down alongside micro bottom-up;

  • iv. addresses today’s semiotic glut of multimedia, multimodal ‘text’ forms;

  • v. satisfies learner-centred pedagogy, myth and holistic motivation.

• 2. Strategies for closer observation, oppositional reading and dialoguing with text:

  • i. Volume: proportion of attention, focus, balance; reference (anaphoric importance, cataphoric suspense, exophoric flattering); repetition, hesitation, repair.

  • ii. Generality or specificity: concrete/abstract; literal/metaphoric; individual/collective; immediate/mediated; present state, event, action, perception/history and background; permanent/temporary; short term/long term; local/global; subjective/objective; lay/technical; synonyms, gradable antonyms, euphemisms?

  • iii. Prominence: form of argument, logic, strategies, functions, sequencing of propositions, e.g. generalisation, causality, conditionality, contrast, example …;

  • iv. Relevance/highlight: + - modifiers, adverbials, semantic prosody, discourse engineering. Corpus linguistics for lexical frequency, concordance, collocations.

  • v. Implicit vs explicit: Assumptions, insinuation, presuppositions; given theme/new rheme; apparent denial, empathy, concession; Modality; Tense;

  • vi. Inclusion vs exclusion: pronouns may identify collocational ‘enemies’ and ‘friends’; dichotomies; social deixis; intertextual references;

  • vii. Attribution of agency, responsibility, blame: nominalisation or functional honorific, passives, reifications; politeness and face; Speech Act analysis.

  • viii. Perspective or point of view: schema, values, thoughts, perceptions, deixis;

  • ix. Fact ~ opinion: mapping discourse structure; direct/indirect/free speech and thought representation; transitivity analysis; identifying attitude, irony, sarcasm, satire; Grice’s maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relevance, Manner;

  • x. Stakeholder voices: uni- or vari-directional voicing; silences, gaps, obfuscations, contrived congeniality, pluralist relativism or deliberation; accent, dialect, variety.

Remember: To practise these skills, you will need to provide your students with challenging multimodal, multimedia, open-ended ‘texts’ for discussion and debate. Advertisements, political manifestos, cartoons, conversations, songs, poems, posters, pictures, tweets.