Quotes About Context

This means we do not ignore the particularity of biblical commands (and apply them to our own day as if they were timeless universals). Nor are we paralysed by their particularity (and thus unable to apply them to our day at all). We rejoice in their particularity because it shows us how the will of God was expressed in their context, and we take them as our paradigm for our own ethical construction.21

So then, we must not read Lamentations without the rest of the Bible. But equally, we should not read the rest of the Bible without Lamentations (as Christians have habitually tended to do).

Being able to conceive moral contexts from multiple sides and being able to more deeply understand each person involved are major achievements in moral development.

One of the regular temptations seducing historians and their audience is to imagine knowledge of the past

In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever in and of itself.

What we don't understand we can make mean anything.

Time has a way of putting things in perspective, of assigning meaning.

Perhaps this is how racism feels no matter the context—randomly the rules everyone else gets to play by no longer apply to you, and to call this out by calling out "I swear to God!" is to be called insane, crass, crazy. Bad sportsmanship.

context is not meaning.

Perhaps this is how racism feels no matter the context—randomly the rules everyone else gets to play by no longer apply to you, and to call this out by calling out "I swear to God!" is to be called insane, crass, crazy. Bad sportsmanship. Two

It's not quite as valuable as if it had been written in 1929, when Martin Luther King was born.

Where's the beef?

But such an affection for what doesn't fit and won't comport, reality out of place...

The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures.

Funny Debates at both Cambridge and Oxford eventually helped to convince me that the only place to be amusing is in a serious context.

If history can do anything it is to remind us that all our judgments are merely relative to time and circumstance.

Factually and objectively, however, nothing is indifferent, neither in nature, nor in the state, nor in science and art. All things, even the most humble, have their specific place and meaning in the context of the whole. Human beings are indifferent only to what they do not, or do not sufficiently, know; they automatically assess and appreciate what they do know. God, who knows all things, is not indifferent to anything.

As a commentary makes no sense without the text which it is expounding, so also the Confessions make no sense without the Bible.

She was the product of her circumstances, of her time and place...

You guys are so small...

It is in the nature of things that the man should be identified with the company in which history finds him.

Personality depends on context, just like culture,' she said. 'Certain people bring out certain traits in each other. Don't you think? If I had a husband, for example, who said, "Your typing makes my brain work better," I would not be so ashamed of my impulse to work. You don't always see how much other people are shaping you.

But don't you think there are larger issues the author is trying to explore?' 'Yes, but they shouldn't be given primacy over or even separated from the experience of the story itself.

Personality depends on context, just like culture,' she said. 'Certain people bring out certain traits in each other. Don't you think? If I had a husband, for example, who said, "Your typing makes my brain work better," I would not be so ashamed of my impulse to work. You don't always see how much other people are shaping you. What are you looking at?