![]() ![]() He imagined a virtual world on top of our real one. Science fiction writer Neal Stephenson coined the term metaverse in his novel “Snow Crash,” published in 1992. ![]() The new moniker reflects a change in the company’s focus, from social media in which people share aspects of their actual, embodied life, to the metaverse, “the next evolution of social connection,” according to the website. Meta has been in the news recently, because Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would be the new name of Facebook, the company he founded and runs. The prefix meta- (which comes from Greek) here means “change, transformation, substitution” and phora “bearer.” The English word transports one thing into another, linguistically the Greek transports things physically. In English, a metaphor is a figure of speech that asserts one thing “is” another, describing or making a claim about the first thing in a vivid, memorable way: “You are my rock.” In Greek, metaphoreis are the people who move your furniture. Over the summer we’ll consider other reparations issues and locales.Building community is hard work, but it might be the fulcrum that lets us balance looking back and moving forward. Treating people well comes with thinking of them that way.Having achieved this, the entire community experiences abundance, “like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.” It earns the name “repairer of the breach” and can “build the old waste places.”If today’s debate over reparations builds community, that sounds like progress to me, whatever decision is reached.Today’s issue, dedicated to reparations, looks at slavery, forced assimilation, and territorial dispossession – in the United States, Barbados, and Canada. And behind those good actions, Isaiah indicates, are good attitudes – compassion and humility. People feed the hungry, free the oppressed, undo heavy burdens. We have to move forward, somehow. To try to understand what might promote that, I turned to the world’s most-read book, the Bible. This phrase in Isaiah 58 piqued my interest: “repairer of the breach.”Here, the repairer isn’t a carpenter or mason but a caring community. ![]() That’s what researchers working with Saint Louis University are doing to learn about those enslaved by Jesuits at the school.Yet no amount of looking back can recompense historical harms. We can’t go back and undo the horrors of the middle passage or the sundering of families at slave auctions.What restoration is possible centuries later?A first step can be looking back and taking an honest accounting of the past. That’s where the hard work happens to restore, renew, make whole. But the shorter word it comes from – repair – strikes me as even bigger.As a noun, reparations suggests that a decision has been reached about concrete actions to redress past wrongs. As a verb, repair is a process. ― After five minutes the bus came.Reparations is a big word, 11 letters. ― Metá apó pénte leptá, írthe to leoforeío. (2010) Etymological Dictionary of Greek (Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 10), with the assistance of Lucien van Beek, Leiden, Boston: Brill, →ISBN (1995) New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, →ISBN (1910) English–Greek Dictionary: A Vocabulary of the Attic Language, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited. Jahrhunderts, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (1994–2007) Lexikon zur byzantinischen Gräzität besonders des 9.-12. G3326 in Strong, James (1979) Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance to the Bible.(1969) Lexicon to Pindar, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter (1924) A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect: Expanded Edition, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, published 1963 (2001) A Greek–English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, Third edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press μετά in Bailly, Anatole (1935) Le Grand Bailly: Dictionnaire grec-français, Paris: Hachette.“ μετά”, in Autenrieth, Georg (1891) A Homeric Dictionary for Schools and Colleges, New York: Harper and Brothers.“ μετά”, in Liddell & Scott (1889) An Intermediate Greek–English Lexicon, New York: Harper & Brothers.“ μετά”, in Liddell & Scott (1940) A Greek–English Lexicon, Oxford: Clarendon Press.( + dative, only in poetry, usually Epic ).( metá) ( governs the genitive, dative, and accusative).( 15 th CE Constantinopolitan ) IPA ( key): /meˈta/.( 10 th CE Byzantine ) IPA ( key): /meˈta/.( 1 st CE Egyptian ) IPA ( key): /meˈta/. ![]()
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