Quotes About Culture

Who we are and when and where we exist affect how we imagine God.

I mean, if we try to explain Jesus's handling of his Bible in terms of how many Christians today feel the Bible "ought" to be read, Jesus will look like one of my college Bible students, playing free association with the Bible. Or worse, we may try to find some way of taking Jesus out of his ancient Jewish world and making him look more like a suburban Protestant, an urban hipster, a tea party spokesman, and so on.

The Creator is being reimagined all the time and can be reimagined through the lens of any culture, of any time and place. No one culture, and certainly not the (largely white male affluent) Western culture I inhabit, can claim superior status for reimagining God once and for all. The Creator doesn't need any of us to sit atop the mountain and speak down to everyone else.

There is no pure "theology" to be contrasted to "feminist theology" or "Black theology," because the supposed pure theology is driven by its own encultured concerns and assumptions.

The reputation Christianity has in the public arena has varied causes, to be sure, including our post-Christian culture, which has little use for religions of any sort. But ultimately some blame must fall squarely on the shoulders of Christian subcultures that are armed with an unwavering sense of certainty in what God wants here and now, which is not up for debate and must be imposed (to the glory of God).

We perceive God, think about God, and talk about God in ways that make sense to us by virtue of when and where we live.

Myths also played a role in national origins stories.

What could be more normal than for different people, living at different times, in different places, who wrote about the past for different reasons and to different audiences, to produce different versions on the past? Nothing. And that's what we see in the Bible.

White privilege is not an overt act of racism but the simple observation that people of white skin are historically and culturally dominant, and therefore seen as the standard or norm.

the ancient Israelites were an ancient tribal people.

It may be hard—sometimes impossible—to see the history in Israel's stories, but we do get a good picture of how these ancient Israelites experienced God.

A God who does not connect to the world around us is a God who cannot speak to us. Believing in a God who demands that we continue to adopt only biblically ancient ways of thinking of God, which are themselves rooted in their own cultural moment, is to diminish God's active presence here and now.

We are all culturally embedded creatures—we can never untangle ourselves from our here and now. We perceive God, think about God, and talk about God in ways that make sense to us by virtue of when and where we live.

Is not literature meant to speak of our being a thousand different kinds of things, at times creating even this diversity? If literature gives up this purpose, this duty, it renounces all claim to legitimacy. I am Hungarian. I am Slovene. I am Serbian. You do not need literature for sentences like that. A bureaucrat will do, and a rubber stamp. A border guard. An Army.

sic] his reaction was a sign of civilization. Nobody reaches for a gun anymore, just for his lawyer.

All it's done is create a separate culture—which, incidentally, never stops whining on about its superiority. That always ends well." "Then it is not unusual for such a culture to be subject to attack from ideological rivals.

Everybody in the GE used secondaries. It was part of the culture now; socially acceptable. There had been many attempts by the Brussels parliament to legislate against it, and the Tax Bureau certainly did its best. But of course, if a method had been found to clear up people's finances and put them on a hundred per cent legitimate, transparent basis, it would have worked for everyone, politicians and tax officials included.

I can talk with HR in the morning.' 'HR?' 'Human Resources.' 'In Brussels that kind of department is referred to as the Office for Personkind Enablement. Resources sounds like something you dig out of the ground. It's offensive to so many people given the historical rare earth mineral conflicts.

Who wants to wind up living in a theocracy?

would be dependent on who was speaking with whom, whose ideologies clashed, whose religions denounced the other. The whole point of ethnic streaming colonies, as Earth had painfully discovered centuries ago during the Great Dispersal, was that foreign cultures can live harmoniously with each other providing they didn't have to live jammed together on the same planet.

knowledge is a true power in any society

Christ, chief, what do they do to these people? Are we working for psychopaths

I've studied this city's society closely while I've been here; it's conservative and sliding down the decadence decay curve.

Why don't Edenists believe, then? Our culture proscribes nothing providing it doesn't harm the majority.