'You have to allow yourself to be imperfect'

Tosca Lee, a noted Christian fiction author, gives a short sermon on creativity:

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Wallace, writing fiction for God, the Cosmos, the Unified Field

“Fiction for me is a conversation for me between me and something that May Not Be Named—God, the Cosmos, the Unified Field, my own psychoanalitic cathexes, Roqoq’oqu, whomever. I do not feel even the hint of an obligation to an entity called READER—do not regard it as his favor, rather as his choice, that, duly warned, he is expended capital/time/retinal energy on what I’ve done.”

-- David Foster Wallace, pre-Infinite Jest, before the break down and the half-way house time that would inform the ethics of Infinite Jest (the ethics both of & in the text), according to an excerpt from D.T. Max's forthcoming biography of Wallace.

My concerns Max's bio will ignore Wallace's religious aspects and efforts still stand, but this excerpt looks really good. 

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To capitalize, or not

"Evangelical" or "evangelical"?

"Pentecostal" or "pentecostal"?

Is it "deist" or "Deist," "atheist," or "Atheist"?

Capitalization of group identifiers in religion writing is not exactly consistent. Certain publishers, journals, and authors have their preferences. The Religion Stylebook is authoritative for news reporters who cover religion, and it has its capitalization rules ("Uppercase only when part of a formal name"). But, generally, there's a lot of variety, a lot of inconsistency, a lot of making-it-up-as-you-go.


The problem, specifically, is with names of groups that are not institutionally unified, and yet still can be thought of as groups and functions as groups. Groups where there's no official organization, and yet there could be.

There's a gap between proper nouns and collective nouns, and that's where these names fall.

There's also the matter of trying to avoid confusion. One may want to refer to "charismatic," and not capitalize the word since it's a very loose movement one is speaking of, and it's not a proper name or  official name, there's no master mailing list or headquarters. Yet, writing "the charismatic woman" is confusing. Writing "the woman who identifies with the movement known as 'charismatic,'" very cumbersome.

So, one capitalizes. Or not.

I don't have a solution to this. I have gone both ways. "Evangelical" I tend to capitalize. "Atheist" I don't. "Pentecostal" I used to not, but now I do. I'm not sure I could defend any of that.

I spent a good while, the other day, trying to decide if it should be "deist" or "Deist." Merriam Webster's -- so helpful -- notes that this is a "noun, often capitalized."

It's good to know, though, that this is not a new problem, nor one specific to a particular period of religion writing.

From Google Ngrams, for example, we find that early American authors and publishers couldn't agree on the capitalization rule for atheist/Atheist. Lowercase was the vastly dominant form in the last decade of the 17th century and capitalization was preferred in the 1660s, 1730s and 1750s.

There's even more disagreement about evangelical/Evangelical, with preferences appearing to swing dramatically from, say, the 1640s to the 1660s, and from the 1690s to the first decade of the 1700s:

Nor does it get sorted out, as a comparison of "evangelical" and "Evangelical" in American books published in the 20th century shows:

A preference emerges for the lowercase "atheism" in the 19th century -- which continues today -- but there's persistence in the capitalizers, too, not all of which can be explained the by the word appearing at the start of a sentence:

I don't know how much can really be drawn from these graphs. Maybe there are some social facts to be cited as explaining one style or the other at one time or another. The bigger picture, I suspect, is that we just fuddle along.

Which I take some peace in. 

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Marx explains German philosophical prose

"German literature, too, labored under the influence of the political excitement into which all Europe had been thrown by the events of 1830.... It became more and more the habit, particularly of the inferior sorts of literati, to make up for the want of cleverness in their productions, by political allusions which were sure to attract attention. Poetry, novels, reviews, the edrama, every literar production teemed with what was called 'tendency,' that is with more or less timid exhibitions of an anti-governmental spirit. In order to complete the confusion of ideas reigning after 1830 in Germany, with these elements of political opposition there were mixed up ill-digested university-recollections of German philosophy, and misunderstood gleanings from French Socialism, and particularly Saint-Simonism; and the clique of writers who expatiated upon this heterogeneous conglomerate of ideas, presumptuously called themselves 'Young Germans,' or 'the Modern School.' They have since repented their youthful sins, but not improved their style of writing.
 

"Lastly, German philosophy, that most complicated, but at the same time most sure thermometer of the development of the German mind, had declared for the middle class, when Hegel in his 'Philosophy of Law,' pronounced the Constitutional Monarchy to be the final and most perfect form of government. In other words, he proclaimed the approaching advent of the middle classes of the country to political power. His school, after his death, did not stop here .... [They] brought forward bolder political principles than hitherto it had been the fate of German ears to hear expounded, and attempted to restore to glory the memory of the heroes of the first French Revolution. The abtuse philosophical language in which these ideas were clothed, if it obscured the mind of both the writer and the reader, equally blinded the eyes of the censor, and thus it was that the 'young Hegelians' writers enjoyed a liberty of the Press unkown in every other branch of literature."

-- Karl Marx, in Revolution and Counter-Revolution; or, Germany in 1848, giving a historical account of the obtuse and turgid style of philosophical German prose.

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