Mickey,
I am delighted that you have decided to engage in a discussion. I am hoping that that decision will ultimately extend to your thoughts on the music, which is where we started.
I am even more delighted that you quoted this passage from Liturgiam Authenticam; it is the very passage that I was alluding to in my comments to jj2011 (#41), and later to Woodstock.
When the original text, for example, employs a single term in expressing the interplay between the individual and the universality and unity of the human family or community (such as the Hebrew word ’adam, the Greek anthropos, or the Latin homo), this property of the language of the original text should be maintained in the translation.
This interplay is captured succinctly in “man”. It is also carried in expressions such as “every one” or, less well, in “us all”, where the interplay of individuality (one/us) and community (every/all) is maintained. On the other hand, “humanity”, “human race”, “humankind”, “mankind” and “men” only denote the whole group; the whole idea of the interplay is lost.
This passage in LA further argues that this nuance (among others) is so important that the use of the “man” should not be avoided merely because it also carries an exclusive meaning, pertaining only to males. (In any case, “man”, without an article, is rather generally and unambiguously inclusive.) I agree. As noted above, I prefer “Lover of man” over “loves us all” (and certainly over “Lover of mankind”.)
But I think that it needs to be emphasized that LA does not suggest that the idea is to use “man”, generally,
because it has a masculine-only meaning among its meanings, and thus has male connotations. (There are of course specific exceptions to this point in certain uses of “man” - i.e., in reference to Christ or Christological typology.) Thus, when one hears the criticism that the use of “us all” represents a neutering, emasculation, or even a castration - all terms that have been used in discussion of horizontally inclusive language in the RDL (although not in this thread) - then the discussion has diverted completely from this passage in LA. There is no support in this passage for such criticism which shifts the discussion from translation to political ideology.
As I said above, I think that the use of words that can be gender-specific in gender-neutral contexts is disappearing our language - like it or not. These changes can be fought by folks who think such a fight is necessary. (And in years of discussing this point, I haven’t had an explanation offered as to why this particular fight is important.) My preference is that they would fight them somewhere other than in my church.
