Quotes About Culture

Russian's claim the banya as their first doctor, vodka being the second and raw garlic the third.

There is always an element of suffering even in the happiness of the Russian people, and without it their happiness is incomplete - Dostoyevsky

Their [500 Siberian Tribes] presence predated Russians by thousands of years. Yet they are routinely referred to as 'half-thawed humanity' and 'descendants of fish'...

The youth-pastor-as-bard is charged with expressing the language, narrative, and culture of the kingdom to listeners who think they already know what the kingdom is all about. For the leader among quasi-believers who are bored and mostly apathetic, who think they know all about "God and stuff," the emphasis is on story.

Are we genuinely prepared to say that working in an office building or shopping in a mall is real, while reading Tolstoy is not?

Youth are natural-born storytellers. Our task in discipleship training is to steer them into a particular storytelling tradition—that is, the narrative, language, and culture of the Christian faith as it has been lived and expressed for two thousand years.

we must become bards: poets charged with the task of keeping and imparting the stories, language, values, and beliefs of a culture.

Writes Native American storyteller Ray Buckley: A child relates storytelling . . . to human contact, and that contact becomes as much a part of the story as the story itself. As adults, we experience storytelling in much the same fashion. Isn't it interesting that in many cultures, storytelling is viewed as a form of touch?7

If we want the next generation to know where they came from and thus who they are, we tell them stories so they won't forget. Then they pass the stories on to the generation after them, and so it goes.

All of us use our imaginations when it comes to faith, and all of us struggle to stay imaginatively healthy in this mostly neurotic, image-conscious culture.

There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells. —FLANNERY O'CONNOR9

Writes Webber: This conflict of style has continued in the twentieth-century debate about traditional versus contemporary worship. Traditional worship seems to be hanging on to modernity while contemporary worship has capitulated to pop culture. In either case the debate continues to rage about style with little concern for a biblical theology of worship. 8

I shrug and smile amiably the way you do when you're in a foreign country and have no idea what anyone is saying, so you end up grinning and nodding your way into a three-way with a henna vendor and a camel.

What I find most interesting in fashion is that it has to reflect our time. You have to witness your own moment.

Wasting time is something that people do or feel all over the world, not just in Italy.

I don't believe that a lot of the things I hear on the air today are going to be played for as long a time as Coleman Hawkins records or Brahms concertos.

Once upon a time the English knew who they were.

Every time you think television has hit its lowest ebb, a new program comes along to make you wonder where you thought the ebb was.

Seriously though, my father was the first African American to sign a contract with the Metropolitan Opera so I grew up with classical music and jazz in the home all the time.

I like to think that I'm a sort of poet for our times.

The expression working like a dog dates back to a time in America when men would rise early, then lie around all day and lick their balls.

Before men ever wrote in clay they cast their words in verse and line, rythymbound in poets' minds, defying time and age.

It's ironic that in our culture everyone's biggest complaint is about not having enough time; yet nothing terrifies us more than the thought of eternity.

Time is man made - No woman would have ever invented time.