Quotes About Culture

More people than ever are slowly but surely turning their ears toward poetry.

I think it's a mistake where rap music is these days. It doesn't seem to be able to look out of the ghetto and that's ultimately unfortunate, because it defines our limitations.

I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written.

turn off your television and read a book!

Jamie and the others come from a culture in which a fire alarm doesn't mean fire; it just means you get to go and stand outside and giggle for awhile. But a prawn or a peanut could still kill you.

The mother of the useful arts is necessity, that of the fine arts is luxury; for father the former have intellect, the latter, genius, which itself is a kind of luxury.

The hearing of masterworks of different epochs will speediest of all cure you of vanity and self-adoration.

Culture socializes us into what is considered proper behavior. For Christians, this is true in our churches as well as in society at large.

The reality is that each of our churches has created a Christian culture and Christian life for likes and sames and similiarities and identicals. Instead of powering God's grand social experiment, we've cut up God's plan into segregated groups, with the incredibly aggravating and God-dishonoring result that most of us are invisible to one another.

The question we need to ask today is this, and this question strikes to the heart of how we read the Bible: Do we seek to retrieve that cultural world and those cultural expressions, or do we live the same gospel in a different way in a different day?

Such practices were the way to "get along," the way to belong, the way to move up in society, and the way to be "in" for that culture and time. It required daily exercise in resistance not to go along.

David Brooks, commenting on the workplace, once said, "Never underestimate the power of the environment you work in to gradually transform who you are. When you choose to work at a certain company, you are turning yourself into the sort of person who works in that company

All of this leads us to one central question for our own lives today: How much of our faith is tied to our own nation and its power?

Pinchas Lapide, toward the end of his book that develops what he calls a theo-politics of loving small steps, finds in these words of Jesus six pillars that can help each of us reshape our culture from hate toward love: (1) Jesus is a realist who knows a world of evil; (2) Jesus has a faith that humans can change; (3) Jesus humanizes haters and their hatred; (4) Jesus calls us to imitate God; (5) Jesus knows this is a battle to fight; and (6) this theo-politics moves in small steps:

The gospel is capable and designed to strike home in every culture, in every age, and in every language.

In the Roman Empire a child's religion was determined not by some choice in the teenage years but by that child's family.

Babylon will never be the new Jerusalem; it cannot be Christianized.

When virtual reality gets cheaper than dating, society is doomed.

The foreigners come out here always to teach, whereas they had much better learn.

mold—William Henry Yale also subscribed to Roosevelt's notions of the ideal American man and of the dangers of "over-civilization," code for effeminacy. The true man, in this worldview, was a rugged individualist, physically fit as well as intellectually cultured, as equally at home leading men into battle or shooting big game on the prairie as chatting with the ladies in the salon.

All religions, I claim, involve counterintuitive beliefs in supernatural beings. Moreover, such beliefs are systematically counterintuitive in the same basic ways. As we shall see, these basic ways of entertaining supernatural beliefs are more or less predictable from a fairly limited set of species-specific cognitive structures. These

In religious thought, a person may ride a horse into the sky (Mohammed), ascend to heaven in a chariot of fire (Elijah), rise to the stars in a carriage drawn by six dragons (Huang Ti, the founder of the Chinese empire), or gain knowledge and afterlife in passing through the digestive tract of a feathered serpent (Maya kings). In

Reducing morality to matters of opinion or feeling is at the heart of Hume's project. The reason his theory is important is that it is widely followed today. Morality is becoming increasingly subjective and is losing its propositional nature as people in our culture insist that judgments of right and wrong are merely individual subjective feelings or opinion.

A third form of relativism smuggled into the popular culture is called situation ethics. Popularized by Joseph Fletcher in the 1960s and 1970s, situation ethics holds that all morality is relative to the situation in which one finds oneself, and one's moral obligation is to do the loving thing in that situation.