The YouTubing Nun | Can Genderless Language Change How We Think?

Sister Vassa Larin is on a digital mission to spread the Russian Orthodox faith.

It’s not every day you encounter a monastic who waxes poetic about the perils of modern partisanship. Or who cites Ricky Gervais as an example of how not to think about theology. And although black-habit-clad Sister Vassa Larin looks every bit the Russian Orthodox nun, little else about her conforms to what you might expect to be “nunlike.”

Take a recent video talk in which, after discussing the nuances of God’s wrath, the Vienna-based American proceeds to denounce men who wear popped collars and women who try — and fail, in her humble opinion — to pull off maxi-dresses.

But that’s the point: Through her podcasts and video talks, released under the brand Coffee With Sr. Vassa, Larin deploys a sense of cultural awareness and wit combined with years of rigorous scholarly pursuit to engage listeners and viewers on a notoriously dense and decidedly unhip topic: Orthodox Christianity.

Refugees worldwide are victims of trafficking and sexual abuse, but in Colombia, Venezuelan migrants are also feeding the criminal ranks.

A Colombian Air Force raid in June 2018 killed 16 members of a dissident faction of the largely disbanded FARC group in Arauca, which lies along the border with neighboring Venezuela. But when Colombian authorities scrutinized the bodies, they found that at least four of the dead fighters were Venezuelan migrants. The dissident group had taken “advantage of their poverty” and desperation, Colombian Army General Helder Giraldo said at the time.

The incident, it’s now increasingly apparent, was no one-off. Since President Nicolás Maduro took power in Venezuela, more than 4 million people have fled to neighboring Colombia and other countries in the region. Such numbers are unprecedented and have been labeled a humanitarian crisis. Both Colombia and Ecuador have each taken in 1.2 million migrants or refugees since 2015. Around the world, migrants fleeing their lands in desperation frequently fall victim to crimes such as human trafficking and sex trafficking. But at least in Colombia, organized crime is taking advantage of the flood of vulnerable Venezuelan migrants to increasingly also pull many of them into its criminal ranks.

Turkish, with its gender-neutral pronouns, encourages more inclusive thought.

There were many things I loved about The Idiot, a quirky novel by Elif Batuman about a Turkish-American girl navigating love and linguistics at Harvard in the mid-1990s. But one of my favorite aspects was its insightful observations on language.

Batuman’s bilingual heroine, Selin, is fascinated by the relationship between language and thought. She muses on the special Turkish suffix that is used to relate information acquired secondhand, and how it means always having to contemplate your “degree of subjectivity” in a way that doesn’t happen in English.