Dialogue, Catalogue & Monologue: Personal, Impersonal and Depersonalizing Ways to Use Words

Dialogue, Catalogue & Monologue is about words and the attitudes that we take toward them. Its purpose is to encourage us to take the words we speak more seriously than we are perhaps in the habit of doing. We have become so used to the deceptive subtleties and half-truths that reach our eyes and ears that we have probably been tempted to lose our faith in words and to back away from the words of others. We may even have been tempted to break faith with our own words and to back away from the words that we speak. Craig Gay suggests that this is to back away from life itself, and that our common future hinges on the recovery of dialogue. Our recovery of dialogue, however, does not, in the end, depend simply upon our own efforts. Dialogue never has. If our words enable us to build up a common world, if they enable us to say "we," if it is given to them to bear any fruit at all in this world, this reflects the fact that we are graciously allowed to participate in the creative potency of the divine Word. After all, we were brought into being and are at every moment preserved in existence by words that God has spoken and continues to speak.