What’s in a Name?

I greatly appreciated the thoughtfully written article on the Outdoor Scripture Sign Crusade [“The Ruin,” by Joe Hart, September]. Kudos to Hart for gracefully rendering the sincerity of his subject’s Christian faith. Mr. Hart’s personal theological commitments, however, seem marred by some muddled thinking. While he admits to having “a kind of rueful respect for the great mysteries of life and death,” he says that he has “come to believe it necessary not to name them. Because as soon as they are named, they cease to be mysteries and become human interpretations, steeped in all our folly and hubris.” Now human interpretations are, as Hart rightly notes, inevitably susceptible to human folly and hubris. But does attempting to use language to describe any mystery necessarily do violence to that mystery? This seems to me an untenable assertion. Does it hold true that that when we assign names to “things” that are externally transcendent to us, that they cease to be mysterious? Think of Love.

Dan Olson
Minneapolis