Quotes About Culture

Jews have a reputation for being intelligent, and they are intelligent. The only place I have ever been where all the Jews are stupid is Israel.

Una universidad era una universidad: que fueras a una cualquiera y acabaras licenciándote era lo único que le importaba a una familia tan poco mundana como la mía.

The outrage, the disgust inspired in my parents by the gentiles, was beginning to make some sense: the goyim pretended to be something special, while we were actually their moral superiors. And what made us superior was precisely the hatred and the disrespect they lavished so willingly upon us! Only what about the hatred we lavished upon them?

the me who's not me encamped boldly in Jewish Jerusalem while I go underground with the Arabs.

Jewish resentment could be just as bad as the Irish resentment.

Las décadas transcurridas desde los años sesenta han llevado a cabo una notable tarea en el acabado de la revolución sexual.

By the time she was their age, she'd seen all the Kurosawas, all the Tarkovskys, all the Fellinis, all the Antonionis, all the Fassbinders, all the Wertmullers, all the Satyajit Rays, all the René Clairs, all the Wim Wenderses, all the Truffauts, the Godards, the Chabrols, the Resnaises, the Rohmers, the Renoirs, and all these kids have seen is Star Wars.

C. S. Lewis shocked many people in his day when he came out in favor of allowing divorce, on the grounds that we Christians have no right to impose our morality on society at large. Although he would continue to oppose divorce on moral grounds, he maintained the distinction between morality and legality.

The first nation to separate Christianity from government produced perhaps the most religious nation on earth.

Christians obscured the good news by their efforts to restore morality to the broader culture?

Others of us, rightly concerned about issues in a modern "culture war," neglect the church's mission as a haven of grace in this world of ungrace.

How can Christians dispense grace in a society that seems to be veering away from God?

The church works best as a separate force, a conscience to society that keeps itself at arm's length from the state. The closer it gets, the less effectively it can challenge the surrounding culture and the more perilously it risks losing its central message. Jesus left his followers the command to make disciples from all nations. We have no charge to "Christianize" the United States or any other country — ?an impossible goal in any case.

Edward Gibbon said that in ancient Rome all religions were to the people equally true, to the philosophers equally false, and to the government equally useful.

The church works best as a force of resistance, a conscience to society that keeps itself at arm's length from the state. The closer it gets, the less effectively it can challenge the surrounding culture and the more perilously it risks losing its central message.

The gospel transforms culture by permeating it like yeast, and long after the people abandon belief they tend to live by habits of the soul. Once salted and yeasted, society is difficult to un-salt and un-yeast.

Because of our failure to live out our beliefs, our own lack of moral clarity, and our meddling with partisan politics, Western culture no longer looks to Christianity as its moral source.

What greater gift could Christians give to the world than the forming of a culture that upholds grace and forgiveness?

A similar cycle has recurred throughout church history. Christians present an attractive counterculture until they become the dominant culture. Then they divert from their mission, join the power structure, and in the process turn society against them. Rejected, they retreat into a minority subculture, only to start the cycle all over again.

Rather than looking back nostalgically on a time when Christians wielded more power, I suggest another approach: that we regard ourselves as subversives operating within the broader culture.

Sadly, Jesus' followers tend to take the reverse approach. Some churches gradually lower the ideals, accommodating moral standards to a changing culture. Others raise the bar of grace so that needy people feel unwelcome: "We don't want that kind of person in our church." Either way we fail to communicate the spectacular good news that everyone fails and yet a gracious God offers forgiveness to all.

No society in history has attempted to live without a belief in the sacred, not until the modern West.

the gospel of Jesus was not primarily a political platform. In all the talk of voting blocs and culture wars, the message of grace—the main distinctive Christians have to offer—tends to fall aside. It is difficult, if not impossible, to communicate the message of grace from the corridors of power.

In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry. – Owen Barfield