I listened to Learning to Speak God from Scratch as an audiobook over a few days. Some chapters are interested or worthwhile, but it’s not said much that was new to me. I’m not sure what I expected getting into it, but this wasn’t it.

The author spends a good amount of time sharing his experience of moving to and making a home in New York City while trying to use this thread to support the “linguistics and words” theme of the book. the metaphors were loose, but I suppose this was his attempt at humanizing his work. I found the stories distracting, especially considering the linguistics content wasn't as academic as I thought it would be.

Instead, the author takes Christian words, a chapter at a time, and either shares about his own journey of using the word in a different way ("broken," for example), suggests that Christians consider the varied meanings and adopt more holistic understandings of overused words ("sin," "love," "grace," "saint") or shares his revelations about the greater context of words ("saint" and "family"). He'll share the historical and biblical context here and there ("confession" and "sin"), but doesn't propose much instruction instead of sharing a hopeful vision that Christians will become more thoughtful about the words they use as he's been learning to do. This is, I believe, what he means by "speaking God from scratch."

I do think it could be a bit of an eye-opener to more conservative Christians, but his approach isn’t all that direct and is kinda wibbly wobbly as he hops from topic to topic, all topics loosely tied together with Words Are Important idea. This read more like a collection of casual essays than a deep dive into a new way to speak about Christianity.