Several years ago an episode of “Antiques Roadshow” featured an usual family heirloom. A book was brought in to the experts for appraisal. The “biblio-expert” was amazed. He claimed the volume was the single thickest book he had ever encountered. Although the volume was only about 10” x 8”, the number of pages bound between its boards brought the book’s height to almost eighteen inches. This weird and wonderful old volume was a dictionary — a book devoted to defining all the words all other books would be composed of.

Despite its great number of entries, that volume could no longer lay claim to citing all our words today. The mark of a vital language is that it is an ever growing, ever changing entity. This is as true for the language of faith as it is for English or Spanish or French. …