Foreign to Familiar (book recommendation)

I’ve just read this book, which I would highly recommend, on the ways people of different cultures think and behave:

Sarah A. Lanier, Foreign to Familiar: A Guide to Understanding Hot- and Cold-Climate Cultures (McDougal Publishing Company, 2000).



In some cultures, it is rude to have a conversation without including everyone present; in others, people are assumed to want privacy and so one needs to ask permission to engage them in conversation. In some cultures people are expected to conform to the group and defer to collective wisdom (“The nail that sticks up is hammered down”), in others people are expected to take initiative for themselves and have their own opinion on everything.

In Chile, a 2 o’clock meeting time means that at 2 o’clock you will finish doing the last thing you were doing and start to get ready to leave to get to the meeting; in Germany it is somewhat different. In some cultures, visitors will drop in at any time unannounced but will fit in around whatever you happen to be doing; in others, visits are mutually agreed in advance and will involve the host cleaning the house and cooking a special meal.

As I said before, if you enter a hardware store in Georgia, another hot-climate culture, and say bluntly, “Five pounds of nails, please,” you will be considered rude. You are expected to say something pleasant and superficial before stating your business, like “How’s it going? You doing all right today?”

If you were to go into a Dutch hardware store talking that same way, the owner would become irritated because you were taking up his time. There, you can just politely say, “Hello, I’d like five kilos of nails, please.” There is no reason to ask how the person is feeling that day. That’s none of your business. It’s personal information and is reserved for relatives and close friends. (pp. 36-7)

Foreign to Familiar is a quick read but has a lot of valuable insights. Some of these are things I’ve discovered from hanging around with people from around the world (especially living in Link House), but this book helped me to make more sense of things that had previously irritated or perplexed me.

“the Bible is not anti-matter”

“It is very important to realise that the Bible is not anti-matter. That sounds like a sentence from Dr Who or Star Trek so I'd better re-phrase it. The Bible does not regard physical objects as second-rate. The Bible doesn't see physical existence as a kind of second-best.”

(Julian Hardyman, Glory Days (IVP, 2006), p. 23)

books and beards

The road running past my college is closed for road works. A sign read 'Access to collage car park only.' It's since been corrected.

At least it got the meaning across, unlike the Welsh of this sign:

The Welsh actually says "I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated." Guess what happened. (The BBC explains)

Someone has spent a year reading through the Oxford English Dictionary in its entirety (and written a book about it). This is a bit like the guy who read all the way through the Encyclopaedia Britannica (and wrote a book on it). (He also wrote a book about trying to follow every command in the Bible for a year). I find it interesting that the OED and the Encyclopaedia Britannica are quintessentially British reference works and yet these feats of reading have been performed by American writers.

Last year a French professor wrote a book entitled How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. I haven't read it, but I think it's great.

Today is my grandfather's 92nd birthday. It is also Reformation Day, to celebrate which, here is a polka and a rap about Luther and the Reformation:




While we're on church history, I recommend reading this post about why it is a biblical norm for men to have beards. There are also some references to great beard proponents of church history. My favourite quotation in this post is from the church father Clement of Alexandria:

"How womanly it is for one who is a man to comb himself and shave himself with a razor, for the sake of fine effect, and to arrange his hair at the mirror, shave his cheeks, pluck hairs out of them, and smooth them!…For God wished women to be smooth and to rejoice in their locks alone growing spontaneously, as a horse in his mane. But He adorned man like the lions, with a beard, and endowed him as an attribute of manhood, with a hairy chest—a sign of strength and rule"