Quotes About Culture

In the 1930s, before the rise of the communist regime, there were already strong forces in the culture that paved the way for it," says Patrik Benda, a Prague political consultant, of his native Czechoslovakia. "All the artists and intellectuals advocated communist ideas, and if you didn't agree, you were marked for exclusion. This was almost two decades before actual communism took power.

To rediscover Christian asceticism is urgent for believers who want to train their hearts, and the hearts of their children, to resist the hedonism and consumerism at the core of contemporary culture. And it is necessary to teach us in our bones how God uses suffering to purify us for His purposes.

It's amazing to me to see parents who have money, and who think they're conservative, abandon their children to the culture, and then turn around and express shock at what the culture does to their children,

If there is no sacred order, then the original promise of the serpent in the Garden of Eden—"[Y]e shall be as gods"—is the foundational principle of the new culture.

History is in the stories we tell ourselves about who we were and who we are. History is embedded in the language we use, the things we make, and the rituals we observe. History is culture—and so is Christianity.

Cultural memory constitutes the stories, events, people, and other phenomena that a society chooses to remember as the building blocks of its collective identity. A nation's gods, its heroes, its villains, its landmarks, its art, its music, its holidays—all these things are part of its cultural memory.

When the light in most people's faces comes from the glow of the laptop, the smartphone, or the television screen, we are living in a Dark Age,

Create Small Fortresses of Memory Figes's observation points to one source of resistance: the family and the cultural memories it passes on. Paul Connerton highlights another: religion.

But it can't be repeated often enough: believers must avoid the usual trap of thinking that politics can solve cultural and religious problems. Trusting Republican politicians and the judges they appoint to do the work that only cultural change and religious conversion can do is a big reason Christians find ourselves so enfeebled. The deep cultural forces that have been separating the West from God for centuries will not be halted or reversed by a single election, or any election at all.

In therapeutic culture, which has everywhere triumphed, the great sin is to stand in the way of the freedom of others to find happiness as they wish. This goes hand in hand with the sexual revolution, which, along with ethnic and gender identity politics, replaced the failed economic class struggle as the utopian focus of the post-1960s radical left.

Parecíamos satisfechos haciendo de capellanes de esta cultura consumista en la que se perdía rápidamente el sentido de lo que significa ser cristiano.

In our time, secular social justice has been shorn of its Christian dimension. Because they defend a particular code of sexual morality and gender categories, Christians are seen by progressives as the enemies of social justice.

in an era in which logical reason is doubted and even dismissed, and the heart's desire is glorified by popular culture, the most effective way to evangelize is by helping people experience beauty and goodness.

A nation's gods, its heroes, its villains, its landmarks, its art, its music, its holidays—all these things are part of its cultural memory.

Defender la ortodoxia bíblica del cristianismo en materia sexual se consideraba ahora de una intolerancia inadmisible. Los conservadores cristianos estaban sentenciados. Este ya no era el país de siempre.

Memory of the past conditions how they experience the present—that is, how they grasp its meaning, how they are to understand it, and what they are supposed to do in it. No culture, and no person, can remember everything. A culture's memory is the result of its collective sifting of facts to produce a story—a story that society tells itself to remember who it is. Without collective memory, you have no culture, and without a culture, you have no identity.

Memory, historical and otherwise, is a weapon of cultural self-defense. History is not just what is written in textbooks. History is in the stories we tell ourselves about who we were and who we are. History is embedded in the language we use, the things we make, and the rituals we observe.

En otras palabras, nuestra cultura actual está basada en el culto al deseo, y en lugar de enseñarnos a qué debemos renunciar si queremos seguir perteneciendo a esta civilización, nos dice que, como seres autónomos con capacidad de elección, debemos desprendernos de las antiguas prohibiciones para descubrir el sentido y el propósito de nuestra existencia.

No regime is trying to steal our cultural memory and Christian identity from us. We are giving it away ourselves.

el mundo occidental vive como si Dios no existiera», dice. «Creo que es verdad. La fragmentación, el miedo, la desorientación y el ir dando tumbos caracterizan a buena parte de nuestra sociedad».

La cultura popular tiene una fuerza de disolución que requiere un esfuerzo ímprobo de los individuos y las familias que quieran hacerle frente por su cuenta. En los tiempos que corren, adherirnos a una comunidad estable de fe es una necesidad.

I am responsible for myself. Every time I do the things I shouldn't do or fail to do the things I should do, I sin. The weight of our sins can seem overwhelming, so much so that we feel trapped by them in a dark wood of our own making. What makes it worse is the sense in contemporary culture that sin is either not real or no big deal.

This kind of thing is why more and more Christian parents are concluding that they cannot afford to keep their children in public schools. Some tell themselves that their children need to remain there to be "salt and light" to the other kids. As popular culture continues its downward slide, however, this rationale begins to sound like a rationalization. It brings to mind a father who tosses his child into a whitewater river in hopes that she'll save another drowning child.

A collective loss of historical memory—not just memory of communism but memory of our shared cultural past—within the West is bound to have a devastating effect on our future.