Marginal Christianity

   August 18, 2014 by Agnes Howard 0 Comments This summer a relative put aside resistance and got his first smartphone, soon after sending us a picture of himself taken with his phone, captioned: “My First Facie.”   Initial mirth over this mistaken terminology—“facie” instead of “selfie”—gave way to conviction that his was, in fact, the much better word. That strange new-ish cultural form the selfie is usually a picture of the face, sometimes captured in an odd expression, sometimes decorated with the presence of others or an interesting backdrop. It is a pose, a mask. It is certainly not a picture of the self. The self is much too elusive to be captured by a phone snap. And the self as a thing, an identity, seems almost necessarily a religious category. Many writers have pondered the self, but late southern novelist Walker Percy’s words rise to mind most readily, in his whimsical treatment of the lost self in the cosmos. Why is...

http://www.aish.com/ci/s/Selfies-The-Word-of-the-Year.html An apt description of our generation. by Rabbi Benjamin Blech   It’s official. The Oxford English dictionary just announced “selfie” as their International Word of the Year 2013. The annual honor goes to a new word or expression that attracted the greatest interest during the year. Judy Pearsall, Editorial Director for Oxford Dictionaries, explained the decision: “Using the Oxford Dictionaries language research programme, which collects around 150 million words of current English in use each month, we can see a phenomenal upward trend in the use of   selfie   in 2013. Frequency of the word in the English language has increased by 17,000% during the past 12 months.” And it’s not just that people are using the word a lot. What it describes has become a universal obsession. In case you don’t know, selfies are self-portraits taken on smartphones and uploaded to social media. More than 53 mill...