Quotes About Context

Remember what we said earlier: for something to qualify as news, there has to be (1) an announcement of an event that has happened; (2) a larger context, a backstory, within which this makes sense; (3) a sudden unveiling of the new future that lies ahead; and (4) a transformation of the present moment, sitting between the event that has happened and the further event that therefore will happen. That is how news works. It is certainly how the early Christian good news worked:

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.

Beauty matters, dare I say, almost as much as spirituality and justice.5 Of course, if you have to choose between beautiful slavery and an ugly Exodus, you must go for the Exodus, but, as William Temple said in a different (though related) context, fortunately we don't have to make that choice.

It is of course possible to produce apparent 'parallels' to almost anything. There is after all only a limited range of things that one can say in any 'religion', and some statements, taken cold and out of context, will look a bit like other statements whose own setting would actually indicate significant differences.

This is not psychoanalysis. It is history.

My third note is that when we therefore use scripture in little bits, cut off from their proper context and made to dance to our tunes instead, all sorts of doubts can creep in, like weeds among the wheat.

This is part of the paradox of love, in which love freely given creates a context for love to be freely returned, and so on in a cycle where complete freedom and complete union do not cancel each other out but rather celebrate each other and make one another whole.

enjoined on all Jesus followers—takes place in the context of the initial victory won on the cross.

Quelle [est] la quantité minimale de passé nécessaire à la production de sens?

If you say the same word a million times will it lose its meaning?

if everything is historically relative, then so is the idea of historicism itself.

Beginning with sin instead of creation is like trying to read a book by opening it in the middle: You don't know the characters and can't make sense of the plot.

Doubt is crucial to science in the version we call curiosity or healthy scepticism, it drives science forward – but it also makes science vulnerable to misrepresentation, because it is easy to take uncertainties out of context and create the impression that everything is unresolved. This was the tobacco industry's key insight: that you could use normal scientific uncertainty to undermine the status of actual scientific knowledge.

To understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty.

Our afflictions brothers and sisters often will not be extinguished, they will be dwarfed and swallowed up in the joy of Christ. That's how we overcome, most of the time. It's not their elimination, but the placing of them in that larger context.

We do not refuse to remember; neither do we find it exactly useless to remember. Rather, we are being rendered unfit to remember. For if remembering is to be something more than nostalgia, it requires a contextual basis—a theory, a vision, a metaphor— something within which facts can be organized and patterns discerned.

Of course, in television's presentation of the "news of the day," we may see the Now...this" mode of discourse in it's boldest and most embarrassing form. For there, we are presented not only with fragmented news but news without context, without consequences, without value, and therefore without essential seriousness; that is to say, news as pure entertainment.

As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant. The abundant flow of information had very little or nothing to do with those to whom it was addressed; that is, with any social or intellectual context in which their lives were embedded. Coleridge's famous line about water everywhere without a drop to drink may serve as a metaphor of a decontextualized information environment: In a sea of information, there was very little of it to use.

if remembering is to be something more than nostalgia, it requires a contextual basis—a theory, a vision, a metaphor—something within which facts can be organized and patterns discerned.

water everywhere without a drop to drink may serve as a metaphor of a decontextualized information environment:

Yeni teknolojiler eskiden beri süregelen enformasyon sorununu tepetaklak etmiÅŸtir: Ä°nsanlar bir zamanlar enformasyona gerçek hayat ortamlar?n? kendileri yönlendirebilmek amac?yla ihtiyaç duyarken, ÅŸimdilerde, asl?nda hiçbir iÅŸe yaramayan enformasyonlar?n görünüÅŸte yararl? olabileceÄŸi baÄŸlamlar? yaratmak zorunda kalmaktad?rlar.

Theirs was a "language" that denied interconnectedness, proceeded without context, argued the irrelevance of history, explained nothing, and offered fascination in place of complexity and coherence.

make content so abundantly available, context be damned, that we'll be overwhelmed by "information glut" until what is truly meaningful is lost and we no longer care what we've lost as long as we're being amused....

I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed.