Providence

CRITICAL: ‘providence’ is now a genuinely rare, archaic-sounding word in ordinary speech, and for many American readers the capitalized proper noun (the city of Providence, Rhode Island) is now the single most common encounter with the word string itself — an almost comically literal illustration of the term’s obsolescence in its theological sense. Separately, contemporary secular folk spirituality has its own popular substitute concept, ‘everything happens for a reason,’ which sounds similar to Romans 8:28 but generally implies an impersonal cosmic balancing mechanism rather than the personal, purposive care of the God of Romans; this difference should be stated explicitly.