The life and work of Presbyterian Church in Canada are guided by many documents – primary among them being, of course, The Bible.
Two other documents that figure prominently in the life of The PCC are Living Faith, a subordinate standard of our Church and the Book of Forms. I wondered what a word-density analysis of those documents would look like. Thankfully, a free web service exists just for this purpose!
Wordle.net is a fun little tool that lets you drop in a block of text and returns a graphical representation of how often each word appears by varying the size of each word. The bigger the word, the more often it appears.
What do these images say about the documents they represent?
Living Faith
Book of Forms
Click images for larger versions
This site is one of 90 on the
March 13th, 2009 on 8:58 am
I have often wondered about the “differences ” between the United Church in Canada, and our Presbyterian beliefs.
I am a member of St Paul’s Presbyterian Church in Englehart ON
March 16th, 2009 on 11:26 am
I have not read the Book of Forms. My impression of it, up until now, has been that it is very rigid in its stance on protocol and procedure. The size of the word ‘may’ makes me think I have the wrong impression. That could be a good thing!
Re: Living Faith I’m glad ‘God’ is the largest word. I wish the word ‘Spirit’ was a little larger as I believe we cannot continue in our faith without the Spirit’s help, guidance and comfort.
March 16th, 2009 on 11:43 am
Katherine: I’m not in a position to comment on the theological distinctions between The PCC and The UCC, but your comment did prompt me to see what “Song of Faith” would look like in a word cloud: click to see
Evangeline: You are not the first to comment on the prominence of the word “may” in the Book of Forms word cloud. Ironically, I almost excluded it from the cloud when I created it as a “common word” like “the” and “it”. In hindsight, I’m glad I left it in.