This blog post offers some of my initial observations on religious sacraments in sign language. It is the conclusion to my paper for the American Academy of Religion. Part I was in my last blog post. The Roman Catholic Mass in American Sign Language, Part II The Catholic Church teaches that its sacraments are visible signs of invisible grace, […]
Last Friday, I presented a paper on sign language in the Mass at an American Academy of Religion (AAR) conference. The theme of the conference was “the senses in religious experience.” How could I resist? It was my first time presenting research on Deaf Catholics to such a group, and they gave me a name for […]
In my last post on Word & Sign, I described the struggles of Charles Jean-Marie La Fonta to become the first deaf priest, including his decades of training in elocution and rhetorical delivery. Fr. La Fonta’s greatest handicap was not his inability to hear but rather the misconceptions of society about deaf people in general. […]
Among the documents I discovered during my recent trip to the Deaf Catholic Archives in Massachusetts was a biography of the first priest who was born deaf, Fr. Charles Jean-Marie La Fonta (1878-1927). The book is called Un Miracle de la Foi. Un Sourd-Muet Devenu Pretre — A Miracle of Faith, A Deaf-Mute Becomes a […]
True eloquence does not consist … in saying great things in a sublime style, but in a simple style; for there is, properly speaking, no such thing as a sublime style, the sublimity lies only in the things; and when they are not so, the language may be turgid, affected, metaphorical but not affecting. -Oliver Goldsmith, Of Eloquence, […]
