8/7/2023 0 Comments Meta meaning greek![]() ![]() The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.īut you know what? We change lives. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.” My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. “Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. Likewise, the metaverse is “above” or “beyond” the actual universe we inhabit.Ībout a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”: Ethics involves questions of “what practices are right and wrong, and what our obligations to other people or future generations are,” according to philosopher Catherine Wilson metaethics takes a step back and looks at the discipline itself, what it means to think about ethics. It means “above, beyond, at a higher level,” as in metaethics. The meta- of metaverse has a different sense from that of metaphor. Right now, the metaverse exists only in bits and pieces – you can put on a virtual reality headset and play a game, or experience augmented reality in which a computer-generated image is superimposed on what you see through your phone – as in the popular game Pokémon Go – or a pair of “smart glasses.” But the company formerly known as Facebook wants to “help bring the metaverse to life,” hence the rebrand. 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. ![]()
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