Speaking in Future Tongues: Languaging & the Gifts of Spirit

In this essay, an ancient historian imagines 2050 as awash in languages: ancient, modern, alien. Animating that vision are memories of teenage weekends spent praying in tongues, and of an ancient Mediterranean text foundational to the adult (re)appraisal of those weekends: Acts of the Apostles. I work through an exposition and reading of Acts 2, concentrating on the scene of glossolalia at Pentecost in order to mount a case for diasporic languaging as a spark to worthy excess-of speech and of difference. Shuttling from the autobiographical to the historical and back again, the essay’s insistent refrain is that diasporic vertigo is not merely a force for good but a good in itself. In the struggle against the commodification and imperialization of language, we can stake out and strive toward a future of flourishing linguistic expressivity, provided the material conditions for that expressivity are secured and safeguarded.