Jonathan Merritt is “Learning to Speak God from Scratch”

Learning to speak God in the 1st Century and the 15th Century. “Annunciation” from the workshop of Robert Campin, South Netherlands. The Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Jonathan Merritt recently mused in The New York Times, “More than 70 percent of Americans identify as Christian, but you wouldn’t know it from listening to them. An overwhelming majority of people say that they don’t feel comfortable speaking about faith, most of the time.

During the Great Depression, the playwright Thornton Wilder remarked, ‘The revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem — new persuasive words for defaced or degraded ones.’ Wilder knew that during times of rapid social change, God-talk is often difficult to muster.”

Since coming to New York City, God-words seem to catch in Merritt’s throat. He can’t get them out and doesn’t feel that people would understand him if he did. So, he is on a mission to reinvent the Christian vocabulary for the 21st Century. One word that he thinks is ripe for a re-tinkering is “neighbor.”

He wrote, “‘Neighbor’is a central term in the vocabulary of faith. Which is why one of Jesus’s most famous teachings is to “love your neighbor as yourself.”

But what does the word “neighbor” actually mean to most people?

So, he went to Times Square to find out what people mean when they think of a “neighbor.”