Quotes About Culture

our confidence is not in the solidity of Western culture or the basic goodness of modern democracy. Our confidence is in Jesus and him alone.

I have argued elsewhere that it is time for a fresh integration of different modes and methods of study, taking full account of these cultural assumptions and allowing the texts themselves to offer their own challenge, their own alternative points of view.

What is needed is history, genuine history, multi-faceted history, 'thick description' history that takes seriously the full range of human life and culture.

The 'popular Paul' has all too often been addressing sixteenth-century questions in a nineteenth-century tone of voice

From the beginning no serious Christian has been able to say 'This is my culture, so I must adapt the gospel to fit within it', just as no serious Christian has been able to say 'This is my surrounding culture, so I must oppose it tooth and nail'. Christians are neither chameleons, changing colour to suit their surroundings, nor rhinoceroses, ready to charge at anything in sight.

Part of the problem in our contemporary debates about asylum seekers or about the Middle East is that our politicians still want to present us with the dream of progress, the steady forward advance of the golden dream of freedom; and when the tide of human misery washes up on our beaches or when people in cultures very different from our own seem not to want the kind of freedom we had in mind, it is not just socially but ideologically untidy and inconvenient.

Part of Christian belief is to find out what's true about Jesus and let that challenge our culture.

Our political discourses have become shallow and naive, not only in descending to spin and smear, but also, more worryingly, in appealing to social and cultural feeling rather than to genuine issues of justice, power and freedom.

This means we can already rule out the revisionist positions on Jesus's resurrection that have been offered by so many writers in recent years. Many suggest that the early disciples were so overwhelmed with grief at Jesus's death that they picked up the idea of resurrection from their surrounding culture and clung to it, persuading themselves that Jesus had been raised from the dead, though of course they knew he hadn't been.

Part of Christian belief is to find out what's true about Jesus and let that challenge our culture. This

But every step away from the Jewish narrative, in this case the Jewish narrative as reaching its focal point in Israel's Messiah, is a step toward paganism.

Paul saw himself living at the ultimate turning point of history. His announcement of Jesus in that culture at that moment was itself, he would have claimed, part of the long-term divine plan.

The much-discussed contemporary phenomenon of cultural and theological relativism is itself in this sense simply the dark side of positivism.

The gospel of Jesus points us and indeed urges us to be at the leading edge of the whole culture, articulating in story and music and art and philosophy and education and poetry and politics and theology and even, heaven help us, biblical studies, a worldview that will mount the historically rooted Christian challenge to both modernity and postmodernity, leading the way into the postmodern world with joy and humor and gentleness and good judgment and true wisdom.

Modesty and decency dwell in the mind, not in a burka.

We must be courageous in speaking out on the issues that concern us: We must not bend under the weight of spurious arguments invoking culture or traditional values. No value worth the name supports the oppression and enslavement of women. The function of culture and tradition is to provide a framework for human well-being. If they are used against us, we will reject them, and move on. We will not allow ourselves to be silenced.

Jerusalem has been our capital for 3,000 years. Beit El and Hebron have been our land for 3,600-3,700 years. Any Jew or Christian or Muslim can open a Bible and read it. You have it there.

If you want to move people, you look for a point of sensitivity, and in Egypt nothing moves people as much as religion.

Human women have been slapping men for being bastards for centuries. You were doing what comes naturally.

Tell me you got back at him." "Are you kidding? I smiled like the perfect Indian princess, asked hi one sugar or two and put in seven. You should've seen his face when he had to choke it down or risk insulting my entire family." Total evil satisfaction in her tone.

He also wanted her to grow up in a united world, not a divided one. Naya should never have to choose between the two sides of her heritage.

If he laid on the Irish any thicker, she'd be drowning in shamrocks.

Even she hair itself rough and wiry; long black knotty locks springing from she scalp and corkscrewing all the way down she back... The only thing soft about Tan-Tan is she big molasses-brown eyes that could look on you, and your heart would beat time...

We do not know a planet that is home. We are always home. It is our job to see and map and learn languages and stories and carry them from place to place.