Richard Duffy explores the ngram viewer from google to look at our faith and what it has to tell us.

1. A random history of
our spiritual lexicon
Richard Duffy

2. • Google has lots of nice toys but one I like
to waste some of my time on is its ngram
viewer. (http://books.google.com/ngrams/)
This looks at a huge sample of the books
published over the last 200 years and looks
at how frequently each word is used as a
percentage of all words used. For example
you can chart the rise technology or find
out that “your mom” has become quite
popular since the 60s

3. Technology

4. Your mom

5. • Now if the ladies haven’t yet hit on the idea
of putting baby names into it and the gents
can refrain from charting the linguistic
history of obscenity, these ngrams can give
us an interesting insight into our culture.

6. We can learn about
how we learn.

7. • ...and see that as we strive to bring hope to
the world around us, we can see that what
we say is a lot less important that it used to
be.
• Showing people and giving people their own
taste of this life God offers, seems to be
beating the idea of telling people. Truth is
becoming more experiential and less
propositional

8. Truth?

9. We can see where our understanding of
the trinity might be lacking...

10. • Now there are many reasons why the words
God and Jesus have other uses outside of
Christianity but even society’s adoption of the
other words tells us that our focus on the
Holy Spirit has clearly lagged behind. This
graph also highlights that overall there has
been less references to God then there
previously had been. Now this could be
explained by the fact that there are just more
books on other things. But even this
observation might hint to us that our
relationship with God is sinking in a sea of
distractions.

11. • One of the most interesting things I found was that
maybe our motivation has shifted and we have lost
sight of the culmination of our faith. Though we
seem as able as ever to see the suffering of the
world around

12. The three remaining elements from the
end of 1 Cor 13 are in decline too and
things are not looking good for the fruit
of the Spirit, except for self control of
which we have psychology and self help
to thank and patients possibly due to the
fact that it is a homonym.

14. I did find one positive
trend

15. • I kid. I found this and I find it hopeful maybe
something of eternity is buried in the heart
of man. People are looking for something
more. Maybe it’s not as far from us all as we
think……..

16. Disclaimer
• This was not scientific research it was just
looking at observations to stimulate
conversation about spirituality. You can
probably use ngrams to undermine most of
my points but I think its somewhere
between interesting and fun.