A multi-year research project on God, language, and diversity is beginning to report back. Journalist Annelise Jolley interviewed researchers including Napoleon Katsos & Daniel Weiss (Cambridge) and project lead Joanna Leidenhag (Leeds) in an article published by the Templeton Foundation.
Here are a few tasters from Jolley’s engaging essay:
Leidenhag on metaphor
“‘Metaphor informs how we think,’ Leidenhag says. Image-laden speech helps humans grasp and understand complex ideas; it brings abstract concepts down to earth. ‘Metaphors typically take things that are more ordinary and embodied—like rocks and gates and sheep—to help make what seem like complicated concepts more immediate and real and concrete in our lives.’”
Neurodiverse encounters with metaphor—Katsos:
“While research on neurodiverse language processing is ongoing, scientists have identified certain patterns. People with autism, Katsos says, tend to produce ‘more creative, unusual, and unconventional understandings of abstract and of figurative language.’ Someone who is neurotypical may arrive at a single interpretation when confronted with a metaphor. A neurodiverse person might generate two or three or five possible interpretations. Or they might come up with a single, but more unusual, response.”
Midrash and the promise of Divine speech—Weiss
“The rabbinic midrash authors believed that the depth of religious language calls for more imaginative interpretation. They didn’t carry this approach over to everyday language, Weiss adds. When someone asked them to pass the salt at dinner, they wouldn’t pause to consider all possible meanings of the request. ‘But they thought that God’s speech has a greater richness that call[s] for finding greater depth through these linguistic means,’ he says. ‘They might see Scripture as revealed by God, but [also] having all these different possible dimensions to be explored—precisely because it’s divine speech that functions differently from everyday human speech.’”
In sum
As Jolley’s essay demonstrates, this research sheds light on the diverse ways religious ideas and texts are received within Judaeo-Christian traditions and among contemporary audiences. Head to Templeton.org (full link below) to discover more about how taking time to understand neurodiverse interpretations might help religious communities “communicate more faithfully about God”.