“Hagamos al hombre a nuestra imagen…” and it was “varón y mujer.”

Felicidades! (a los amantes del género)

There are 595 million Spanish speakers in the world. Almost 500 million of them are native speakers, making Spanish the second largest mother tongue on the planet. And it is growing.

It turns out that these folks are masculine and feminine also. They too have gender. So it is with great pleasure that I announce the Spanish version of enGendered: God’s Gift of Gender Difference In Relationship, now available from both Tesoro Biblico and the Spanish Logos in electronic version.

The thing about languages, though, is that they don’t correspond one to one. When studying in the field of natural language processing, I remember reviewing the early efforts at artificial intelligence translation. During the cold war with Russia, going automatically from English to Russian was a hot research topic and so it got a lot of academic funding.

The excited scientists confidently built a system and fed in the sentence, in English:

            “The Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”

It came out (in Russian) as:

            “The vodka is good but the meat is rotten.”

Translation is not always easy.

Just so, my title, enGendered, doesn’t come out that way in Spanish. Because “engendered” is an untranslatable play on the English word, the translators of Lexham Press settled for “Concebidos por diseño (or, “Conceived by design”): el regalo de Dios de las diferencias de género en las relaciones.” This title doesn’t carry the same punch, of course. But such inevitable losses, arising from our heritage in Babel, do not overshadow the great achievement of the work. Many thanks to Lexham Press for this success, allowing another large swath of our world to benefit from a Biblical examination of gender.

Yet, this work is really only preparation for an important effort coming up next year. The 2022-2023 Gender Victory Tour made over 20 speaking stops in the USA. But 2024 will extend this teaching train to the golden land of Mexico.

The “Un Buen Beso” (“A Good Kiss”) Tour will make stops this coming Spring in several important seminaries south of the border, where the Church will be soon pressed just as it is in this country. The leaders there need no less to be thinking through a theology of gender. As we go, we will be able to make available to these important leaders both enGendered and Across the Kitchen Table in their language.

Why go to Mexico? Because God said, “Hagamos al hombre a nuestra imagen…” and it was varón y mujer. No, He didn’t say it originally in Spanish. But He didn’t say it in English either. He probably didn’t even say it in Hebrew. As enGendered imagined Genesis 1 in its opening pages:

It is somewhat nonsensical to speak of speaking then, be­fore the waters that would make speaking possible. Rather, He knew into me, conveyed across unseen bonds of love. It was our own private language, precise and poetic at the same time, ev­ery phrase laced with layers of meaning and music.

However He said it, it is worth publishing far and wide….

In Our Image: Male and Female