The Meaning of It All in Everyday Speech

In his Everyday Speech books, Don Cupitt is introducing a new empirical way of doing theology by showing from ordinary language what religious outlook currently belongs to us all. In The New Religion of Life in Everyday Speech he showed from current idioms how life itself has recently become the new religious object. Now in this new book he studies our use of the terms It and It All, to show how ordinary language sees the human condition. The answer turns out to be a form of radical religious humanism: language seeks to affirm and defend the integrity of our human converse by resisting the constant pressure of life’s threatening impersonal backdrop, It All. Don Cupitt is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.