Its title and back-panel blurb are somewhat misleading: Faiths in their pronouns reflects a field of scholarship completely removed from the evidentiary standards to which sociolinguistic researchers are accustomed. This review therefore approaches the work with two broad questions in mind. First, how is scholarship from sociolinguistics transformed and utilized by other fields of study? And second, what can social scientists glean from various projects of “humanism” that bring to the forefront linguistic phenomena such as pronouns?

Cragg initiates this largely Christian-theological work with the basic idea that pronoun use delineates and reflects social groupings, selfhood, and, most important, religious identity. Alongside this proposition is put forth a broad interpretation of the roles of familiar pronouns the author finds within religious text-artifacts; the goal seems to be a pan-historical or ahistorical understanding of “faith” in world religions, predominantly Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Interlaced with a curiously obscure analogy of the Internet as society and websites as religions, the account ultimately urges that religious claims yield to the priorities of basic humanism in the 21st century, while simultaneously regarding secular space as lacking in “awareness” (p. 191).

For a book purportedly on pronouns, rarely are we, I, or you offered in their original form, as if the Bhagavad Gita, Qur'an, or Torah were inscribed in King's English. Owing to the lack of precise citations, the reader is left hoping that these sources are, in fact, among those the author used, given that the works of Milton, Donne, Kipling, and Shakespeare clearly guide his exposition. Much presupposed knowledge is required for the reader to steer through the ill-defined positioning of “followers” in space and time, the various Jewish, Islamic and Christian theological debates, and the author's indirect manner of expression. Therefore, this book would likely interest only a finite group of devout readers.

Although the degree to which the author's assessment is based on translated texts remains unclear, chaps. 6 and 7 on “The Muslim personal pronoun” demonstrate an investigation of an Arabic Qur'an (and perhaps Hadiith or other Arabic texts) that does not focus on pronouns, per se, but is noteworthy. These chapters' arguments regarding Muslim conceptions of Allah, Muhammad, and al-'umma ‘nation, community’ rest chiefly on two types of evidence. First, certain constructions of possession

and definiteness, characteristic of Arabic, are claimed to singularize both Allah and Muhammad throughout the Qur'an and thus in the hearts and minds of Muslims. And second, recurrent rites, obligatory prayer

, and patterning of certain phrases in the Qur'an are said to impose both a personal spiritual accountability and the keys to communal participation for Muslims. This latter rationale would benefit from a more explicit theory of “orthopraxy,” if indeed the author's theological interpretation of Islam seeks to make space for the nonurban, nonelite and nonliterate. For researchers interested in semantics, though, the tenuous handling of Arabic's

and forms of definiteness may inspire genuine study.

It is clear that pronouns, items long scrutinized by linguists and philosophers, have gained a broader recognition as purveyors of social meaning. Exactly how they do so within and across texts and contexts may not be as well understood by (or serve the purposes of) other types of writers. Pronouns-as-identities (and the Internet-as-society, for that matter) may now be considered free-floating cultural objects, completely uncoupled from theoretical roots in deixis or dialogue. Therefore, it is difficult to say whether this book represents a mishmash of “sexy” lures or, to borrow a term from Urban 2001, a crude “secondary replication” of scholarship along the lines of Buber 1958 or Mühlhäusler & Harré 1990. Perhaps it is both. We can, of course, envision a more successful exploration of religious identity through pronoun use within texts such as those mentioned above – one that (i) clearly presents the texts under examination, (ii) addresses the issues involved in translation and the rationale supporting such translation, (iii) situates interpretation of patterns within relevant cultural and historical contexts, and (iv) then relates this interpretation to present social group concerns. Without some of these supports, this theoretical house is built on sand.

Other, more successful humanistic works share the goal of transcending material existences through unabashedly creating fictions, and the focus on the pronoun is invaluable in these endeavors. For example, the love poetry of Pedro Salinas quite intentionally constructs dialogue between the poet's speaking voice and us readers, all the while enticing us into this new reality:

Of course, the beauty of starting with a blank slate is that a poet maintains strict control, each pronoun colored by and alongside its unfolding context. Social scientists and historians do not have the luxury of manufacturing the contexts in which their subjects appear. But the courtesy of writing accounts with a strong regard for actual readers – an eye to the dialogism so inherent in culture – is among the analytical tools that successful works of humanism have imparted to social science.