Compassion. Indignation. What comes to mind when you think about these words? You might say that we could sum up almost everything we see on social media or hear in political campaigns under one of these two words.

Under the banner of “compassion,” we find those who insist that calling any human behavior wrong or sinful is necessarily unloving and uncompassionate. And under the banner of “indignation,” we find those who are self-righteous and acerbic.

The problem is that words can’t be defined however we’d like to define them. When we wrongly define a word, we corrupt its true meaning, ripping the word out of its proper domain and context. Continue reading at Tabletalk magazine.