Tag Archives: Jesus

On Conversion

On Conversion – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I spoke with a friend who converted to Catholicism as an adult about her conversion and how she relates to the Catholic Church as a whole.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, I spoke with a friend who converted to Catholicism as an adult about her conversion and how she relates to the Catholic Church as a whole.

The Catholic Church in 2025 stands at a crossroads in the shadow of our late Pope Francis when the world at large has fallen into so many new wars, conflicts, and when fearmongers are the loudest voices in so many countries and governments. It was striking then when Pope Leo XIV began his Urbi et Orbi address, his first public address as pontiff, last Thursday with the words “peace be with you.” To achieve that peace, one needs to allow one’s heart and soul to open to the possibility of peace and of dialogue with both our innermost selves and the world around us. Faith gives an avenue for this dialogue which has provided a moral foundation for generations. Biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman made the case in his book The Exodus: How It Happened and Why It Matters that the faith of Moses and the Hebrews evoked in Exodus was the first faith recorded which preached love for neighbor and love for oneself. It was the first time in human history that a religion sought to elevate humanity and dignify us as children of God made in the Image of God.

Kim Meyer

I’ve long considered this topic of conversion; in fact, I’ve often noticed how different the perceptions of our shared religion are between cradle Catholics like myself and converts to the Church. My own Catholicism is built on fifteen centuries of believers in my family going back to my distant early medieval Irish ancestors who in the fifth century surely noticed when St. Patrick made his pilgrimages up the holy mountain on the southern shore of Clew Bay, a mountain that towers over the townlands where my ancestors lived for thousands of years that now bears the saint’s name as Croagh Patrick. I asked my friend, Dr. Kim Meyer, if she could tell me more about her perceptions of her faith and our shared religion. A convert to Catholicism who grew up in a secular suburban Kansas City family with Lutheran and Methodist roots, Kim told me about how she found her faith through the most horrific experience of her life as a journalism student at Kansas State University reporting on the activities of a cult in Abeline, Kansas in 1977. Kim described it as “a really dark, dark time and my editors had people in the room with me when I was editing it because I was terrified. It was several months of terror.” After one particularly intense night of terror during her investigations in Abeline when she felt she “was terrified for my soul and I started praying to God, and my Mom had given me a penny of the 23rd Psalm on it, but I was so scared that I couldn’t remember the Lord’s Prayer so I kept rubbing this penny saying, ‘God, if you exist, save me until morning.’ It was really a horrible, horrible, terrifying experience. The next morning, I was still praying and the sun came up, and I realized that the sense of evil was no longer present.” Kim described how she went to several local religious leaders to tell them her story, including the cult leaders, but the only one who listened was the local Catholic priest at St. Andrew’s Parish in Abeline, Monsignor Alfred Wasinger.

This speaks to something that I’ve known, and that has led to little conversions of my own often from one plan or ambition to another. We are drawn to people who appreciate our humanity and who listen to us as this priest listened to Kim at the darkest moment in her life. That’s something that Pope Leo was famous for before his papacy; in all the reports of his life he’s often referred to as a good listener. This draw to a faith that listens to its people is what drew Kim to the Jesuits. More than just thinking of herself as a convert, Kim said she doesn’t “think of myself as a Catholic first. There’s still so much tradition and so much politicking around Catholicism that I find deeply offensive, but the Jesuits’ critical thinking, open spirit, missionary focus, all of that, and it’s the same theology for both, and it’s all about how we practice, and I’m not into the way how some sects of Catholicism practice.” For her, the Jesuits are “really trying to walk the Way of Jesus. It’s literally the Way of Jesus. Some people want to walk the way of Paul or the way of the most recent Pope, but they forget it’s really all about Jesus.” 

Converts like Kim have more of an opportunity to find “the beauty of questioning and the opportunity to discover their faith.” This questioning has marked my faith for most of my life, yet even more so in my adult years as I moved on from my Jesuit undergraduate university and onto graduate and doctoral programs outside of the Church. Whereas my faith is so deeply rooted in millennia old traditions and inheritances embodied in the last century by the various neighborhood parishes that my family called home in Chicago and Kansas City, Kim’s faith seems to fly above that tradition, seeking a closer connection with God through the mysteries of Catholicism and our belief that God opens us to a wider world of possibilities. In Kim’s words, “once I came to believe that God loves me and God is in every person, and I really believed in it that the world wasn’t really the same.” It is notable that of those old neighborhood parish churches, Kim and my parish, St. Francis Xavier in Kansas City is the only one left open. Unlike the others it has adapted with the changing demographics of its home neighborhood, which a few generations ago was largely Irish American, and now caters to Kansas City Catholics seeking Ignatian spirituality. St. Francis was one of the fastest growing parishes in Kansas City during the pandemic, in large part because of its Jesuit affiliation. However, due to a variety of factors the Jesuits left the parish at the end of July 2024 and transferred its leadership to the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, leading to an uncertain moment for a parish that stands out in this city for its openness and Ignatian spirituality. Kim noted that “Last year we didn’t know what the transition away from being Jesuit would look like, and our community is just as Ignatian as it has ever been.”

Because of this, Kim said she feels more closely connected to the Jesuits than to the Church as a whole. I’ve been struck in the two years since I met Kim how much her outward approach to others reflects this deep well of her faith. I felt in our conversation that we could relate in that depth, though I do not outwardly project my own beliefs in the same way she does, preferring to take a rational approach to life. Yet that rationality has its limits, as I’ve written here in the Wednesday Blog before. Faith and a conversion to accepting the possibility of the improbable is necessary to be open to new and unknown things both in the furthest fringes of our knowledge and at home in our understandings of ourselves. Like anything, there is a blind spot closest to home and that self-reflection and introspection is necessary to live a full and enriching life.

With the election of Pope Leo, the Cardinals embraced this period of self-reflection for the Church in full. They chose a pope who embraced synodality in his Urbi et Orbi address and who said he would continue the efforts of Pope Francis all while seeking to build bridges between the increasingly disparate factions and camps in the Church. The Pope’s humanity shows in his imperfections, in his poor history of dealing with the sex abuse scandals, something familiar to many of us in our own bishops and local leadership. Kim’s approach to life, her mentality born from her Catholic faith has led her to think “’what would Jesus do?’ and that means looking at each person and trying to see God inside of them, and that’s each person.” This stands in contrast to “‘what is the right thing,’ which has less clarity and less consistency in the secular world. Because if you think right vs. not right, where you draw that line is a lot more subjective in the secular world.” The greatest way toward conversion, she said, is prayer. “Pray with others, go find somebody you trust as a spiritual mentor. Stretch yourself and pray. Find ways that you praise that you never imagined.” Both of us pray the Ignatian Examen in our own ways, as Kim said “Prayer changes over time. What I do in my prayer time changes from one season to the next.”Just as May brought us a new Pope and each passing day new things to worry about in politics, the economy, and in ordinary life, so too this conversation told me that the place where one’s spirit is resting will change with time. It may float along in the river of our life, following the currents where they take it, yet it will be there for an opportunity to pray to announce itself. In the wider world we hear messages of people seeking connection with something greater than themselves; it’s a part of our social nature. We do these things to find connection with other people and to grow in those connections as we were born to do. These are all conversions, all transformations of ourselves which can reawaken something dormant that will lead to us living fuller and richer lives. A conversion can reawaken the self to their spirit and spiritual need for connection to something greater than themselves through God as love.

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The Divine Essence

Art: Studio of El Greco, “Agony in the Garden,” (1590) oil on canvas, 102 x 131 cm, Toledo Art Museum, Toledo, Ohio, USA, ⁠National Gallery, London⁠.

The Divine Essence – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, a meditation on the Name of God.—Art: Studio of El Greco, "Agony in the Garden," (1590) oil on canvas, 102 x 131 cm, Toledo Art Museum, Toledo, Ohio, USA, National Gallery, London.Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, a meditation on the Name of God.

At the start of Advent last November, I picked up a little blue book after Mass as an Advent lectio divina guide for the coming weeks. I’d done this several times before in Advent and Lent, the two holy seasons of preparation in Christianity, yet this time I actually read that little blue book and kept up with it each day through Christmas. By the end of it I was looking forward to being done with this one part of my nightly routine before bed, the time when I was able to sit and read the daily reflection. I wasn’t sure then if I would pick up the little black book when it appeared at my parish the weekend before Ash Wednesday, and yet when it was there, I took a copy home.

This year’s little black book offers reflections on St. John’s Gospel, the most spiritual in focus of the evangelists. Several aspects of the readings have caught my attention, usually out of a curiosity concerning the grammar or translation of the biblical text. On one early day, the reflection was on John’s recounting of the arrest of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. This recounting contradicts the three other Gospels in that Jesus asks the soldiers to let his disciples go, rather than the disciples taking flight in fear of the soldiers. It is more self-sacrificial, following the prophetic undertones of the Gospel overall. Not only does this vital moment of arrest in the Passion narrative take place in a Garden, akin to the Garden of Eden where humanity’s fall into sin occurred, but it is also here where Jesus revealed Himself as God the Son. Quoting here from the New American Bible:

[4] Jesus, knowing everything that was going to happen to him, went out and said to them, “Whom are you looking for?”[5] They said to him, “Jesus the Nazorean.” He said to them, “I AM.” Judas his betrayer was also there with them. [6] When he said to them, “I AM,” they turned away and fell to the ground. [7] So he again asked them, “Whom are you looking for?” They said, “Jesus the Nazorean.” [8] Jesus answered, “I told you that I AM. So if you are looking for me, let these men go.”

(John 18: 4–8)

In this passage the omniscience of God is first revealed, followed by the humility of God the Son as merely one among them, “the Nazorean.” Here though the omnipotence of God as the Divine Essence, existence in its purest form as “I AM,”[1] before showing such mercy toward the soldiers at making it clear he was in their power and would surrender to them yet asking for mercy from them for his friends, his disciples who not being omniscient were very much afraid as any of us would be. It is the third part of this passage, the identification of God that I wish to focus on here.

The Name of God is known as the Tetragrammaton after the four Hebrew letters which comprise that Name. These are the four holiest letter combinations out there. The Name of God is too sacred to write in Judaism, and considering Hebrew is an abjad lacking written vowels it’s not entirely certain how this Name was originally pronounced before that prohibition.[2] This prohibition extends in some traditions to not even writing the word God, as it is capitalized as the common Name of God in regular parlance. I grew up capitalizing this word in reference to the Abrahamic God, who I do believe is the Creator and One True God, I don’t just recite the Nicene Creed every week at Mass to do it; and yes, this capitalization is in line with the tradition of capitalizing proper nouns in all of the languages I speak and write. Yet I’ve never really thought of God as a name, rather it’s a title in the same way that Christ is a title and Jesus the name. I’ve had some students over the years who won’t write God out, instead writing “G-d” out of respect for this title, which I think is fair. For the sake of my readers, I won’t include the Hebrew Tetragrammaton here, you can look it up on your own.

What I’m more interested in is how the Tetragrammaton was translated from Biblical Hebrew into the other languages in which I’ve read the Bible. There are really four such languages: English, Latin, Koine Greek, and Irish. 

I was first introduced to the Bible and to my Catholic faith through English, I was born in the second generation after the vernacular Mass was allowed largely replacing the older Tridentine Mass said in Latin. The New American Bible (NAB) which I read from a few paragraphs back is the translation that I grew up with, and the one which I use in all aspects of my life. It was also developed during Vatican II as the approved English biblical translation for the United States. In Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand the Jerusalem Bible (JB) is the translation used, while in Great Britain the English Standard Version – Catholic Edition (ESV-CE) is used. 

I was introduced to the Latin Vulgate and Greek New Testament and Septuagint in high school and college and today I own a copy of the Greek New Testament published by the German Bible Society (Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft). Both are key sources for the English translations that I grew up with, alongside the Hebrew Tanakh itself. I chose St. James Academy for my high school years largely because they offered Latin, and while the fact that Latin remains the official language of the Roman Catholic Church, I was more interested in reading classical Roman literature. Likewise, the first of the two Ancient Greek classes I’ve taken was at St. James under the direction of our Latin teacher Bob Weinstein. That class was focused on Classical Attic Greek from democratic Athens of the 5th century BCE. In college at Rockhurst I made the 5 century leap forward to the Koine Greek of the 1st century CE when I studied Biblical Greek under Professor Daniel Stramara. I wasn’t the best student, yet I was fascinated by that class and would love someday to study Latin and Greek more fully. It would certainly be a benefit to my research.

Finally, while I’ve known of the Bíobla Naofa, the approved Irish translation of the Bible, for a long while, I only bought one in the last year. Irish is an odd language for me that feels untouched by the embrace of vernacular piety for me as by the time the Vatican II Council occurred between 1962 and 1965 my family largely spoke English, though the last generation of native Irish speakers were still around. For me then the Bíobla Naofa is as much a study tool as it is an aspiration of piety. I keep mine on my desk the easier to reference when I’m curious how a particular word or phrase is translated into Irish. The Bible is a good source if you want to see how common biblical names are translated from one language to another. It’s how I know that the Irish biblical tradition predates the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169 because St. John is called Naomh Eoin, not Naomh Seán. My name is an Irish rendering of the French name Jean, while Eoin is an older rendering of the Latin and Greek name Ioannes, which is also the parent of the French Jean. The Evangelist is thus known by the same name today as the Celtic monks knew him in the early medieval period when the Irish cultural influence on Europe was at its peak.

Returning then to the Tetragrammaton, when I read this passage from St. John’s Gospel that evening, I was curious to see how it was translated from the original Koine Greek into Latin and Irish. Translation is a funny business, it’s not ever as simple as going word-by-word and replacing the original language’s text with the target language’s equivalent. There’s far more nuance to each language and its dialects to allow for this. I’ve learned this in my efforts to translate André Thevet’s 1557 book Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique from Middle French into Modern English. The last English translation was written in 1568 and is thus in Early Modern English from the generation just before William Shakespeare. Thanks to the bard Early Modern English is still fairly familiar to many of us, myself included, yet it is still different from how this language sounds and is written today. To make the first draft of my translation I brought together a composite of the 1558 Antwerp French edition, the 1568 London translation, the 1878 Paris French edition, and the 1944 and 1978 Brazilian Portuguese translations to create an accurate and modern English translation fitting for the 21stcentury.[3] All this is to say that translation is far more complicated than just taking the original text and interpreting each word on its own. The words work together within the ecosystem of the phrase.

I was curious then to see if the English “I AM THAT AM” was perhaps clunkier than the Greek. This full phrase is familiar to me especially from the Burning Bush story in the Book of Exodus (Ch. 3), in which Moses meets God in a burning bush. This scene is beautifully retold in the 1998 animated film The Prince of Egypt which is a classic from my childhood. The four words we have mirror the four letters of the Tetragrammaton in the original Hebrew, yet these four words are reduced to two in Greek. In John’s telling Jesus’s response “I AM,” is written in the original Koine Greek as “ἐγώ εἰμι,” (John 18:5) with the full phrase in the Septuagint’s retelling of the burning bush story written as “ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν,” (Exodus 3:14) or I am the Being. I feel this final word ὤν is essential here. It is the present active participle of the Greek copular verb εἰμι. In a sense, it is saying that God is existence itself, the essence behind the Cosmos and all Reality itself. One translation of ὤν in the Liddell, Scott, Jones Ancient Greek Lexicon (LSJ) is the English word fact.

This is adopted into Latin somewhat, as the Vulgate is drawn so much from the Greek Bible, where the Name of God is rendered as “Ego sum qui sum,” whence we received the English “I AM THAT AM.” Yet because Latin doesn’t have a similar present active participle for the copular verb sum, the reuse of the indicative present active form sum is necessary. The English present participle of be is being, yet replacing the second am in the name with being doesn’t work grammatically in this language.

I was pleasantly surprised to see the Irish translation of this phrase for how simple it is. The Greek ἐγώ εἰμιwas translated as “Is mise é,” a phrase which I’d usually translate back into English as “I am he.” On an immediate level this is profound in its everyday character. This is something I’d say when someone asks “An bhfuil tú Seán?” Yet on a deeper level it speaks to Irish’s ability to express emphasis in a manner unfamiliar to English. The first person pronoun in Irish is mé, this is the translation of both the English I and me. Yet the -seending tacked onto it expresses extra emphasis on the pronoun. The closest we can get in English, or at least in my American English, to this is saying “me too,” or perhaps capitalizing ME and adding an exclamation mark behind it (or several if you’re one of those people who are overly fond of exclamatory sentences). So, God’s existence is expressed in Irish in the emphatic, as something to be shouted from the rooftops in wonder all while reflecting the priority Irish gives to all of us to be worthy of emphasizing no matter how mighty or small we may be. The Irish translation of the full Name from Exodus is “Is mé an te atá ann,” which is closer in meaning to the Greek ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν, translating into English as “I am the one who is.” Again, this speaks to the ability of Irish to interpret the existence of God as the essence of reality.

In my undergraduate years when I started to think deeply about the Tetragrammaton & the Name of God, I settled on the idea that the best way to describe God without limiting God in human terms was to focus on God as the essence of life. In this way, I began to refer to God in my theological studies as the Divine Essence, in an attempt to better reflect this truth that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. The Divine Essence rises above any limitations of human terminology or senses of gender that weigh down even the word God, which is traditionally masculine in English and its fellow Indo-European languages. I’d rather see God in God’s fullness existing beyond gender, the better “to see the Face of God,” to quote Jean Valjean’s last words in the musical adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.I’ve had trouble with this thinking in the last few years, because how should I begin to approach God in these terms in prayer? How can I seek any sort of personal connection to God when I’ve devoted such effort to seek to understand God in such abstract terms by stretching language as far as it will go without breaking? This Lent that is where I stand, and where I am uncertain. Looking at the story of the Garden of Gethsemane told in John’s Gospel in this year’s little black book, I noticed that while Jesus revealed His true Nature, he also identified himself as mere “Jesus the Nazorean,” a human and God all the same. That human nature is approachable, personable. I remember how in the Ignatian Examen one is called to think of one sitting with Jesus while one reflects on their day. This is a starting point, and a good point of departure for reflection this Lent.

[1] In my Catholic tradition we capitalize this phrase as the name of God.

[2] See Richard Elliott Friedman, The Exodus: How it Happened and Why it Matters, (New York: HarperOne, 2017) for more on this. I really enjoyed reading this book a year ago.

[3] NB: I used a 2018 reprint of the 1944 Brazilian Portuguese translation.

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On Names

On Names – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

Season 4 Finale: This week, to celebrate Christmas I’ve decided to write a bit about naming conventions that I’ve come across, and to explain why I use my full name professionally. Nollaig shona daoibh | Merry Christmas! — Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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Season 4 Finale: This week, to celebrate Christmas I’ve decided to write a bit about naming conventions that I’ve come across, and to explain why I use my full name professionally.

In American culture middle names have a bad reputation. They’re most famously used in our childhoods to scold us, and in adulthood they most often appear in legal matters. A writer naming non-descript American characters John Booth or Lee Oswald might get away with it but include their middle names Wilkes and Harvey and you have two of the most notorious assassins in American history. Most accused or convicted murderers in our legal system tend to be known in the press by their full names: first, middle, and last. There’s an odd cadence to it when these people are identified by the police or the courts. It’s one of the more common times when middle names get used.

I go by my full name professionally. On my website, in my email signature, and in every conference program and academic publication that I’ll ever appear in I’m identified as Seán Thomas Kane. Trust me, I didn’t intend to draw any connection between myself & the men mentioned in the last paragraph who killed two Presidents who I’ve always looked up to. In my case, the use of my middle name has a different sort of significance. In my extended family I often get called Seán T., in part because I have many relatives who are named Thomas, one of whom goes by T. among the family. Whether intentional or not, my parents gave me one of the most traditional Irish names they could have. Irish names are traditionally patronymic, meaning the person is so-and-so, son or daughter of so-and-so, descendant, son, or daughter of so-and-so. Those last names (or surnames if you aren’t American) that begin with O’ refer to families who are descended from a specific person who lived centuries ago. The ones that begin with Mc however are Anglicizations of the Irish word mac, meaning “son” of a specific person who lived centuries ago. My father’s name is Thomas, so in Irish my name is Seán mac Tomás, or Seán, son of Thomas. Kane is an Anglicization, or better an English phonetic rendering of the Irish name Ó Catháin, pronounced two different ways depending on where you’re from in Ireland (for those reading this, listen to the podcast to hear those two pronunciations.) Cathán was a more common Irish given name in the Early Middle Ages and derives from the word cath meaning battle.

This was in the back of my mind when I decided to start going by my full name professionally. It was 9 March 2016 and I had a few hours without much to do while waiting for a car to pick me up at Lyon-Saint-Exupéry Airport on my way to the eastern French city of Besançon, the capital of the Franche-Comté region and a city which Caesar mentioned in his book about the Gallic Wars (De Bello Gallico 1.38). That cold and rainy Wednesday in March there was a national railway strike in France and I ended up booking a back seat of a Renault Clio driven by a Frenchwoman who spoke little English alongside two other Frenchwomen who again spoke little English from Saint-Exupéry Airport outside of Lyon to Besançon, a good 4 hour drive. Right before they arrived though, I was on Facebook posting an update about my trip and thinking about how I wasn’t entirely sold on sticking with Seán Kane as my name professionally, after all when you search Seán Kane on Google you get a fair handful of results. There on Facebook I noticed that my friend Luis Eduardo Martinez, a fellow graduate student in International Relations and Democratic Politics at the University of Westminster, and a gentleman who I consider a good friend to this day, used his middle name professionally. I felt inspired and changed my name on my Facebook profile from Seán Kane to Seán Thomas Kane then and there standing in the airport parking lot.

Where the last paragraph took place.

This proved to be even more advantageous when the Renault carrying the three Frenchwomen arrived as the driver stepped out and proved that the way Seán is spelled makes little sense to a monolingual French speaker. I remembered when I started studying French at Rockhurst University and we chose French names to use in class how I immediately was discontented with being called Jean alone, as I’d rather be called Jean-Thomas because that’s essentially a French translation of my name coming from Irish. So, I suggested that she call me “Seán-Thomas” which was heard as “Jean-Thomas.” Et voilà, that’s how it all got started. For the record: the Irish name Seán is in fact just an Irish spelling of the twelfth century Norman French pronunciation of that French name Jean, which is also the source of the English name John. You can hear the connections better in an English accent than in my own American one where the oh sound in John has shifted closer further forward in the mouth.

This wasn’t the first time I’d changed my name on my Facebook profile. For a while in high school, I went by my Irish name, Seán Ó Catháin, and that was the name on my early membership cards with the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Yet as much as I was inspired by the Gaelic revival and wanted to do my part to restore our ancestral language, I found that it was impractical to use in America and that deep down I do identify more with Kane than Ó Catháin because that’s the name my grandparents, my dad, and most of my paternal relatives use. Kane itself began as a misspelling by the U.S. Army draft sergeant processing my great-grandfather Thomas Keane when his number was drawn in 1918. He enlisted and served as an artilleryman in France and eventually became an American citizen as Thomas Kane because the sergeant told him if he wanted that first e added back into Keane on his papers he would have to go back to the back of the line and start the process over again. 

So, to answer a question I often get in Kansas City: no, I’m not related to any other Kanes in this city except my Dad, and in fact outside of my Dad and his brother’s family all of my living paternal relatives who share our family name on either side of the Atlantic spell it Keane. I suppose I could change mine back to that one, I suspect my granddad’s cousin and longtime Wednesday Blog reader Sr. Mary Jo Keane would’ve approved of that, yet at this point the name dispute feels moot especially considering the Keane spelling only goes back another generation or two to about the 1850s before which in the official British government records written in English my great-grandfather’s great-grandfather’s name was written as Thady Caine. In Irish his name would’ve been Tádhg Ó Catháin, and we know he spoke Irish as his first language. So, what was his name? I’m honestly not sure.

I like how different naming conventions reflect different cultures in their own ways. Our Irish patronymic system is really more Gaelic than Irish, after all it’s the same system that’s used by our Scottish Gaelic speaking cousins and it mirrors a very similar system used in Welsh. In fact, my Welsh ancestors’ family name was Thomas, which derives from the Welsh ap Tomos. Fitting, eh?

When I teach about the Vikings I like to bring up the Norse patronymic system too and explain that Leif Erikson (as we call him in English) was actually Leifr Eiríksson in Old Norse, and that following this tradition as it’s today practiced in Iceland were I born there, or should I someday immigrate to that island republic I’d probably start going by an Icelandic version of my name: Jón Tómasson, dropping the Ó Catháin/Kane family name all together in regular use there to better fit Icelandic society while still retaining it outside of Iceland. I see this as similar to how patronymics are used in Russian, where Tolstoy’s tragic character Ivan Ilyich is known by his first and middle name and not by his first and family names Ivan Golovin as we’d do in the English-speaking world. There, for the record, Seán mac Tomás would translate as Иван Томасaвич (Ivan Tomasavich).[1] In a hypothetical blending of cultures where Irish speakers interacted more with French speakers in North America than with English speakers I could see our patronymic system developing into the French system of having double names, thus why when I still published a French translation of my C.V. I would write my name as Seán-Thomas with the hyphen which I don’t use in English.

Another set of naming systems that I’ve encountered that I appreciate are those originating on Iberia where the family names of both the mother and father are included. My same friend Luis Eduardo Martinez’s full name, and the name I first read when I met him in September 2015 is Luis Eduardo Martinez Mederico. In this Spanish naming custom, his father’s family name appears first followed by his mother’s family name. This is opposite to the Portuguese where the maternal family name precedes the paternal one. So, in the Spanish custom my name would be Seán Thomas Kane Duke, while in the Portuguese custom it would be Seán Thomas Duke Kane. My parents and I actually refer to our family as the Duke-Kane Family, and we’ve joked about what my life would’ve been like if I’d been given both family names at birth in that order. I often conclude that including the East Yorkshire name Duke alongside Kane would’ve made me sound more English.

Then there are the professional names like Smith or Miller. These derive from the first bearer’s profession, so Jefferson Smith had an ancestor somewhere in the distant unwritten past of that Frank Capra film’s imagination who was a blacksmith. Today, on Christmas, we celebrate someone who has such a name, that being Jesus. I get annoyed with my fellow Americans who see “Christ” as Jesus’s last name because it’s not a name at all but a title in the first stage of becoming a name. This name as we understand it ought to be written in English as Jesus the Christ, from the Greek Ἰησοῦς Χριστός through the Latin Iesus Christus, but that word Χριστός is merely a Greek translation of the Hebrew word māšiah (מָשִׁיחַ), which again is usually rendered in English as Messiah, the name of Handel’s most famous oratorio and what Brian certainly wasn’t (he was a very naughty boy.) This is a kingly title, fitting with our view in Christianity of Jesus as priest, prophet, and king appears most prominently this time of year in the Feast of Christ the King, something we celebrate in the Catholic Church at the Liturgical New Year, which was 24 November this year.

Jan van Eyck’s depiction of Christ the King from the Ghent Altarpiece (1426)

A brief digression here: this past Feast of Christ the King I learned that the official name of the day is the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. While that last title might sound overly grandiose in the twenty-first century it actually comes from Ancient Mesopotamia, where the most powerful monarchs of those city states as far back as Sargon of Akkad (r. c. 2334–2284 BCE) claimed this as their imperial title: šar kiššatim, which actually meant King of Kish, the primate of all Mesopotamian cities and according to the older Sumerian King List it was the first city to crown its kings following the Great Flood. So, in essence this title places Jesus, a humble carpenter who was incarnate as God the Son as the true “King of Kings (forever, and ever) and Lord of Lords (for ever and ever)” to quote from the Handel.

Now, back to that rendering Christ as Jesus’s last name. In his lifetime, Jesus was known as Jesus of Nazareth, and in earlier times Christians were known as Nazarenes (Acts 24:5). This word is still used to describe Christians in Hebrew in the form notsrí (נוֹצְרִי) and in Arabic with naṣrāniyy (نَصْرَانِيّ). Thus, he was known more by a locator name than by a last name in the modern American sense. Furthermore in John’s Gospel, St. Philip referred to Jesus as “Jesus, son of Joseph, from Nazareth.”[2] So, in the culture in which Jesus was born he would’ve been known most fully in this way rather than with any last name that we may recognize. It’s important to remember that Jesus’s ministry took place 2,000 years ago, and contrary to some popular belief he didn’t speak English. English wasn’t even a language then, though an older form of Irish was around, just probably not heard as much in Galilee or Judaea.

So, let me conclude with the bits that seem to have started as identifiers that came at the end of people’s names before there were family names in the sense that we use them today. These are often locators of where the person in question was from. In the case of Leonardo da Vinci, da Vinci merely refers to the fact that Leonardo was born in the Tuscan commune of Vinci. These particles of place tend to denote nobility in some names, see the French, Spanish, and Portuguese de, the Italian de’ and di, and the German von. However, I see the utility in having this locator in someone’s name to make it clear that even though they’re a Booth they’re not related to every other Booth around. That way a random John Booth living in 1865 would’ve had less trouble because of his more infamous counterpart’s scheming that Good Friday. I’d ask though, in my own case whither would such a locator in my name identify? Where would it refer to? Would it stick just with me, saying that my original hometown is Wheaton, Illinois, so I’d be Seán Thomas Kane of Wheaton? Or would it go back to the origins of my particular Kane/Keane/Caine/Ó Catháin family in the Derryhillagh townland outside of Newport, County Mayo, in Ireland? In Irish the way this would be written would either be with a different Irish preposition ó (yep, there are at least two of these), or with the preposition as. In my Irish as I speak it, I say as in this context more than ó, as in to say “Is as Meiriceá mé,” or “I am from America.”

We don’t do these in Irish names, in part because of our patronymic system which does a fine job on its own. Sometimes when I’m writing stuff in Latin and I want to adopt the style of the Renaissance humanists who I read in my research I’ll try to Latinize my name with one of these locators, rendering my hometown of Wheaton, Illinois by using the name of the Roman goddess of what, Ceres, and essentially making a town name from there. Thus, Wheaton becomes Ceresia. The tricky thing is that when I’m translating my name into Latin, something that was done in academia more into the nineteenth century but is almost never done today, I have a conundrum of whether to start from Kane or from Ó Catháin. I for one don’t like how a Latinized Kaniussounds, so instead I do go from Ó Catháin and use Cahanius, or Ioannes Thomae Cahanius Ceresius in full.

Names are important, and they say as much about the person who bears them as the people who named that person and the culture to which they belong. I’ve played around with my own name a fair bit, as you’ve seen. Today I’m more used to being called Seán-Thomas in French than in English, though the latter has happened more and more. I’ve even noticed that people have started calling me Thomas seeing that name and recognizing it faster than they do Seán, especially with the fada on the a. I smile and acknowledge them, after all I’m happy to be mistaken for my Dad. Looking forward, should I be fortunate enough to name my own children I’ll say these two things: first I’m not the one who’ll be pregnant with them for nine months, so I shouldn’t get first call on their names, and second there’s that Irish tradition that offers a simple answer to this conundrum. Will my first-born son be named Thomas as well then? Yeah, maybe. We’ll have to wait and see how this poorly named lifetime membership with one of the dating apps works out for me. I certainly hope I’m not putting my name out there for the rest of my life, though you can bet I’ll be using that lifetime membership joke for as long as I can.

Nollaig shona daoibh a léithoirí rúin! | Merry Christmas, dear readers!

[1] NB: I’m using Russian as the example here because that’s the one I’m more familiar with. No political inclinations toward the Kremlin in their invasion of Ukraine are intended.

[2] John 1:45 (New American Bible), see more here.

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Human or Man?

Human or Man? – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

In English should we say that Jesus "became human" or "became man"? Join me as I work through the history of the Nicene Creed and how this most pivotal of beliefs was interpreted first by the Greek speaking Church Fathers who wrote the Creed, later by the Latin speaking Catholic Church, and today by us English speakers. You can read a transcript of the full episode here. Written, read, and produced by Seán Thomas Kane. © Seán Thomas Kane, 2021.

On Saturday I took the opportunity to go to 4:00 pm Mass at my home parish here in Kansas City, MO while I was in town for Thanksgiving. It was wonderful getting to see the place again, and even though it’s only been 3 months since I left town for the semester a part of me doubted I’d actually see these places that are so dear to me anytime soon.

During the Nicene Creed as I recited the words I’ve known at least since freshman year of high school, the proclamation of the Faith, kind of a Pledge of Allegiance that we Catholics still have mostly in common with our Orthodox and Protestant cousins, I noticed something that made perfectly good sense but I hadn’t thought of yet. A friend who was standing near me said that Jesus “became human” instead of “became man.” It caught me off guard for a number of reasons. Firstly, the official English translation that we use in the US does use the older word “man” rather than the newer “human” but secondly, I had a feeling from what I could remember of the Latin translation that our English one is more closely based on that “human”, “homō” in Latin, might actually be the noun used.

That evening I made a point of going to the source. I looked up the Creed in Latin and sure enough the line there is “et homō factus est,” which I’d translate in my schoolroom Latin as “and he was made human.”1

The one catch here is that the Creed wasn’t originally written in Latin but in Greek. So, in order to get to the original meaning and intent of the Church Fathers at the Council of Nicaea (325) that wrote the Creed we still say nearly 17 centuries later, I’d need to call up my admittedly elementary and rusty knowledge of Greek. Unlike Latin, which I studied all through my high school years, have picked up again twice since, and use professionally on a regular basis as a historian of Renaissance natural history, I haven’t been lucky enough to use much of my Greek. I took Classical Greek in my senior year of high school after finishing my last required math credit the summer before, and then took a semester of Koine Greek (aka New Testament Greek) in my sophomore year of undergrad at Rockhurst. So yeah, my Greek is rusty. I can still read the alphabet pretty well and I know enough about etymologies that I can get by, but I never really got it the way I got Latin or French.

Still, I was determined to spend at least a few minutes of my Saturday evening at home working through this question: what was the original Greek line that the Latin translator rendered as “et homō factus est“?2 I went to a pretty reliable source that has both the Latin and Greek versions and started scouring the Greek, figuring I was either looking for one of two words: ἄνθρωπος (anthropos) meaning human or ᾰ̓νήρ (anḗr) meaning man.3

One of the big tricks that I’ve learned after now a few years of working with sixteenth-century printed books that are often not in English is the quickest way to find a particular word you’re looking for is basically to just focus on finding that word, don’t pay too much attention to the rest of the text. Once you’ve found the word you’re looking for then go and read the rest of it to put that word into context.

One example of a 16th century printed book that I’ve worked with.

Anyway, back to the story.

So, I scanned through the Greek original version of the Nicene Creed and was left stumped. I couldn’t find either ἄνθρωπος or ᾰ̓νήρ anywhere. I began to wonder if there was some third Greek word for human or man that I didn’t know about, and knowing what I do know about Greek there being three words for the same concept isn’t at all out of the question. Looking for clues, I turned then to the previous line, “and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary”. In the Latin this appears as “Et incarnātus est, ex Spirītū Sānctō ex Marīā Virgine“. A great trick for any researcher working in a second or third language, or better yet one that they have a passing familiarity with is to always keep an eye out for personal names or other proper nouns: those will usually be more prominent, and when it comes to the BVM (Māter Deī, Θεοτόκος [Theotókos]) you can bet her name will be prominent. Sure enough, I quickly found mention of a Μαρίας τῆς Παρθένου (Marias tés Parthenou) meaning the Virgin Mary and kept looking along that line for something that resembled either ἄνθρωπος or ᾰ̓νήρ. Two words over came my answer: a fittingly long Greek verb ἐνανθρωπήσαντα (enanthrōpōpésanta).

I quickly returned to my favorite English-Greek dictionary and found the root form of the verb in question, ἐνᾰνθρωπέω (enanthrōpéō), meaning “to put on human/man’s nature,” or more essentially “to become human/man.” The only job left to do was to take out that clunky slash and acknowledge which noun, ἄνθρωπος or ᾰ̓νήρ was at the heart of that verb. As it turned out, and as you can see, it’s ἄνθρωπος.

Thus, to the best of my efforts as a scholar and translator, and as you can see, I’d argue that in English saying that Jesus “became human” works, perhaps even better than “became man”. Why? Well, remember that English has changed a lot as a language in the past century. We have so many more people and ideas using this language than ever before, and to be honest while the English noun man began as both a word meaning males in both gender and sex (ever a complicated series of terms) and our entire species in general, it has steadily come to lose that second, neuter meaning in favor of solely being a masculine noun. Neil Armstrong’s first words when he stepped onto the Moon’s surface in 1969 were “it’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” For a guy in 1969 that worked. But for the astronauts that will be setting foot on the lunar surface again in the next few years with the Artemis program, I firmly believe that man won’t cut it anymore.

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post that was a predecessor to this now weekly Wednesday Blog about why I prefer to say “you guys” rather than “y’all”. Long story short: I’m not a Southerner, and I’ll fully admit when I hear “y’all” I don’t tend to think of much besides the people who drug our country into a Civil War 160 years ago because they couldn’t accept the fact that it was morally corrupt to own other human beings. The fact that their heirs are still fighting against racial equity in this country makes my case for me. In that same blog post I also argued that we should move away from the word mankind, and towards something that more closely reflects a more gender neutral word for our species: humanity. On a small side note here (in a paragraph begun with a side note) I don’t like humankind because it combines the very Germanic -kind with the very Latin human. Instead, Latin gives us the word humanity, derived from the Latin hūmānitās. Let’s use that instead. It works, and frankly as we do become far more globally interconnected (which, guys, really isn’t a bad thing at all), it translates far better than humankind ever will.

All this said, getting back to the main point after a brief stop in the politics and history of American English, I think it’s actually a lot better and more profound to refer to Jesus as God becoming human instead of God becoming man. It means that Jesus came to be among all of us, to be one of all of us. I’ve written before in an academic setting about why I believe it’s flawed to refer to God in gendered terms: gender is cultural, it’s fundamentally human, and it keeps the blinders on us to the extent that we can’t make a true effort at seeing, and by seeing hopefully we can get closer to understanding the fullness of God. From there, I’ll leave the writing about how to understand the fullness of God to the theologians and clergy.

Footnotes

  1. Why the difference between the official “became” and “was made” in my translation of the Latin passive verb factus est? Factus est is the passive perfect 3rd person singular form of the verb faciō, which my old stalwart dictionary William Whitaker’s Words translates into the English verbs “do, make, create; acquire; cause, bring about, fashion; compose; accomplish.” So, while “became” is more poetic, “was made” is more accurate to the verb in question. But, theologically was Jesus the passive recipient of the blessing of being made human? After a significant amount of time for what I thought would be a short search I found an entry in the Liddell, Scott, and Jones Ancient Greek Lexicon (LSJ) on the Perseus database that listed the original Greek verb that was translated into Latin as factus est, namely ἐνανθρωπήσαντα, as an aorist participle singular active masculine verb in the accusative case. So basically, while the Latin factus est is in the perfect passive voice (meaning it’s describing an event that fully happened to the subject in the past), the Greek verb is an event that happened in the past without any time specified as to when it happened (kinda like a French passé simple?) This alone shows the complexity of trying to translate from Greek into Latin and then by extension into English. One final note here: while the Greek verb grammatically has a masculine gender (see above in this oversized footnote) I’d stress that that gender designation is referring to Jesus who it’s generally accepted was biologically male. In the process of trying to figure out how the Greek verb in question (ἐνανθρωπήσαντα, in case you forgot) was conjugated, I found an interesting article from the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University discussing how best to translate this very verb in the Nicene Creed from the Greek original into English. So, to return to the original question that led me to write this footnote that would outrun the Gettysburg Address in length: the fact that Jesus in the Latin was apparently the passive recipient of his humanity, given to Him by the Holy Spirit is more or less a “it’s the best we can do” translation from the original Greek where Jesus actively “became human”. So, in English while the best translation from the Latin is “was made” human, when taking the Greek into account the official Catholic “became” human works a lot better, because it recognizes that at the end of the day Jesus and the Holy Spirit are consubstantial with the Father, meaning they all share the same Substance, i.e. they are all One. “Three Persons in One God” as my notes from my undergrad freshman Honors Christianity I notes say.
  2. For my fellow grammar constables out there, yes I put the quotation mark outside the quotes. There’s a reason for that, it’s not a part of the quote so I don’t see why it should be included in the quotes. I’m going to write another blog post about this eventually.
  3. For my Greek friends and all Greek scholars out there: to my understanding ᾰ̓νήρ is the Ancient Greek word for “man.” To my understanding the more familiar and modern word άνδρας is descended from the accusative singular (direct object form) of ᾰ̓νήρ.

“Son of God” – Appealing to its core audience

Kansas City – As a Catholic, whenever I think of the Life of Jesus the image of sitting in Mass when I was in 1st grade during the 1999-2000 school year springs to mind. Not only was the Church celebrating the new millennium, but also honouring the 2000th birthday of Jesus of Nazareth, at least according to the traditional calculation. For me, it still seems a bit odd to make a film about the Life of Christ, after all how does one find an actor to portray, well, the Son of God? In this way I do kind of agree with my Muslim friends and neighbours in using their arguments for not portraying Muhammad in art by saying that perhaps such a holy figure as Jesus should not be portrayed on film as He is God. However, Jesus was also a human being, and a fairly well-spoken one to boot, so in another way it does make good sense to depict his life on the screen.

Image

Diogo Morgado who plays Jesus. Courtesy of IMDb.com

To be brief, Son of God was not quite my cup of tea. I found myself laughing through much of the first half, between the corny dialogue, at times poor CGI, fairly unconvincing acting, and the fact that Jesus was wearing makeup. However, the film began to lose its serious tone when they introduced the characters by their modern English names. Yes, yes, I know, this film was made to be seen by the masses, much more so than Mel Gibson’s epic of 10 years ago, but at the same time it just sounds weird to hear a little boy running down a street in a small Jewish town shouting “It’s Jesus!” I feel that in this instance, as in any historical film, the best first step towards keeping the seriousness of the piece there is to keep the characters’ names the way they were in their lifetimes. So, rather than Jesus, call Him Yeshua (ישוע), or instead of referring to our narrator, St John the Evangelist, as “John”, why not call him Yovhann (יוחנן). I will say on that matter, that as an Irish speaker, referring to Jesus as Yeshua makes more sense as in Irish His name is Íosa. And while I’m on the topic of names, the whole “You are Peter, the rock, and upon you I will build my Church” loses its meaning when Simon Peter is referred to as Peter rather than Simon before that in the film. Also, I wasn’t aware that St Thomas was ginger until tonight. That must have made him stick out quite terribly during his mission in India.

My biggest complaint with the film is its directing. Firstly, we didn’t need the “hero shot” of Jesus and St Peter in the latter’s fishing boat just after making the big catch. After that is the repetition of captions whenever the scene changed to a different location. I think after the first time seeing the poor CGI overview of Jerusalem the viewer should be able to remember what they’re looking at, we don’t need reminding thereafter. Finally, there were some key elements of the Passion that were missing from this depiction: the Washing of the Feet, St Veronica fully enfolding Jesus’ face in her cloth, Jesus stopping to talk to the Women of Jerusalem, and the mixture of blood and water coming out of the wound pierced by the Holy Lance. Portuguese soaps actor Diogo Morgado gave a mixed performance as Jesus. Like the film itself, I found that his acting improved from when he arrived in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.

On the other hand, Son of God does a good job appealing to its target audience: Protestant Americans. I saw a few episodes of the original History Channel miniseries The Bible from which much of the footage in Son of God comes, and have to say that I was turned off of the show quite quickly by the fact that every time a commercial break came, along with it was at least one, though often two, ads for Christian Mingle. Honestly, the show’s creators did a good job at avoiding any major sort of controversy in this film, which is more than I can say about the miniseries, but in the attempted avoidance, so much of the reality of first century Palestine were lost.

For example, I find it hard to understand why there had to be characters of every racial background, except East Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Amerindians in the film. If the director was that concerned with avoiding racial issues, why not just make all of the characters, um, I don’t know… Middle Eastern? Then again, it might concern the core audience that Jesus and the Disciples were from a region of the world that today is by majority Muslim. After all, the present must be taken into account when portraying the past. Oh, and don’t get me started on some of the oddities involved in the film’s Romans.

In the end, I’d say if you want to go see Son of God, then go see it. It is an interesting film, that has a unique take on the Life of Christ. However, the full heart-wrenching emotion of the Passion simply is not entirely there in this production, nor is the true majesty of just how fully human and fully divine Jesus was. If you want to see that full emotion, my recommendation would be to watch Gibson’s Passion of the Christ.