Anna Wierzbicka’s new book What Christians Believe: The Story of God and People was published in July 2017 by Znak in Cracow, Poland, in Polish. An expanded English version is to be published by Oxford University Press in 2018. The book, with full colour illustrations from Christian art over the centuries, retells and re-thinks the basics of Christian faith in simple words and sentences which can be understood by anyone and which are cross-translatable into any language. The book is a semantic and theological experiment, and at the same time, it is an experiment in cross-cultural communication through a minimal language. (Minimal Polish and Minimal English match, word for word and phrase by phrase.) The book will be launched by Professor Peter Hill (SLLL) and Professor Cliff Goddard (Griffith).

 

Professor Anna Wierzbicka is a Professor in the Linguistics Program, School of Languages, Literature and Linguistics. She has published over twenty books and edited or co-edited several others. Her work spans a number of disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, cognitive science, philosophy and religious studies as well as linguistics, and has been published in many journals across all these disciplines. Professor Wierzbicka is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Australian Academy of Social Sciences, and of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the winner of the Dobrushin Prize for 2010 and of the Polish Science Foundation’s 2010 prize for the humanities and social sciences.

 

This book launch will be followed by a light lunch.