Books by Jonathan Dunne

Stones Of Ithaca is a book about God in language and the environment. It looks not only at a theology of language, but also at a theology of stones. What lies beneath the surface of language, beneath the surface of the world around us? The book contains 80 black-and-white photographs of stones collected on the beaches of the Greek island of Ithaca.

This revolutionary book sets out to persuade the reader that the English language is not the result of years of haphazard evolution, a chaotic atom-like conglomeration of words, but a carefully planned whole in which each word has its place and is connected by a consistent set of rules. It is not by chance that 'earth' is 'heart' or 'soil' is 'soul', for instance, or that 'salt' makes us 'last' ('You are the salt of the earth') but 'last' is in fact 'lst'. This book journeys from the Book of Genesis and Creation to Revelation and the Last Judgement through the English language, suggesting that language has something to tell us about the environment and that he who would be true to himself is inexorably pushed out on to the margins. First published in 2007, it is now reprinted. A later book, The Life of a Translator (2013), also looks at English word connections and discusses coincidence in translation.

How are English words connected? Is there a consistent set of rules by which words in the English language are connected not according to their etymology, their evolution over time, but according to their letters? These letters may be rearranged, read back to front, altered according to the laws of phonetics, their position in the alphabet, their physical appearance, their numerical value. So while the reverse of "live" is "evil", we can count down from I to O and find "love" instead (as "sin" gives "son"). The "ego", by taking a step back in the alphabet, can be turned into "God". Using the laws of phonetics, we can realize that the true purpose of the "self" is to "serve". In "The Life of a Translator", Jonathan Dunne offers a clear, direct introduction to the ways in which English words can be connected according to their DNA, arguing that words have something to tell us about human life, but their meaning is hidden and must be deciphered ("God" is "code"). In this sense, language is similar to the environment. We think we see what is around us, but we are spiritually blind even after we have opened our eyes, and it is this spiritual blindness causing a crisis in the world because of how we treat our world, the environment, each other and, ultimately, ourselves.