by Annie Carter

There is some debate among the literary world about whether or not the names of the planets should be capitalized and when. I know this because last week I was editing a piece of writing for work in an older program and looked up at the screen (yes, I am one of those who looks at her hands while she types) to find that the page was covered in little green grammar markings. I hadn’t capitalized sun once. I was a little embarrassed. How could I have forgotten such a basic rule?

So I did some research.

It seems that NASA has historically capitalized all of the celestial beings, even the Moon and Sun. However, there are many grammar books that point to the rule of “only capitalize the planets when there is no article to precede it.” And still more that essentially call it a matter of style and taste.

I read for a while. Got a little confused. And finally made a command decision to capitalize all of the planets and stars because, well, they are very grand. Surely there is no proper noun more proper than a planet. And I figure defaulting to NASA is usually a good call.

I thought of this a few days later when I was talking to a friend about Noah. She is a brilliant woman with a mind for facts and figures. And she very simply stated that she found it hard to embrace a religion that tells a story about a man loading up a boat with every creature on the whole Earth and tells that story as fact. I mean, what boat could possibly carry all of that? What flood could possibly cover the whole Earth? What does a boat have to do with anything anyway?

The Bible is full of wild stories. And many of those stories find themselves up for debate. Was there a literal giant boat? Did the sea literally split in two? Was a grown man literally swallowed by a whale? You can find just as many books and opinions on this matter as you can grammar books. But my friend and I talked for a while and we listened for a while. And in the end I found myself making another command decision of sorts. I do not know if an old man made a literal boat to sail a literal great flood. But I do know that Jesus is who He said He is. And no boat, no matter how large, changes that.

The Earth goes around the Sun. It also goes around the sun.

*Photo Credit: Andrew Russell, Creative Commons