Three Dangers of Religious Traditionalism

And how to avoid them.

The Word of the Year

Since 2003, the dictionary publishing company, Merriam-Webster, has declared a Word of the Year. Winners include blog, bailout, socialism, and capitalism. Even truthiness and wOOt have Word of the Year trophies.

In 2015, the Word of the Year wasn’t even a word but rather the suffix -ism.

The suffix -ism has its roots in Ancient Greek and originally was used in English to turn a verb into a noun. For example, criticize becomes criticism.

Today, when -ism is added to the end of a word, it is often intended to transform a noun into an ideology.

For example, race becomes race-ism, where the ideology is defined by prejudice based on ethnicity. Adding the suffix to material becomes material-ism, an ideology focused on acquiring wealth and possessions.

If this were a philosophy course, there are hundreds of other -isms we could discuss, such as altruism, transcendentalism, Marxism, egalitarianism and on and on. One of these -isms is religious traditional-ism, which is the focus of our this post’s text in the gospel of Mark 7:1–23.

Typically there is nothing inherently wrong with the root word of an -ism, whether, race, material, or…