Quotes About Modernity

The modern Christian feels professionally obligated to act jovially and jokingly, to show his teeth in a cheerful grin, to profess a slavering friendliness, in order to prove to the unbeliever that Christianity is not a "somber" religion, a "pessimistic" doctrine, an "ascetic" morality. The progressive Christian shakes our hand with the wide grin of a politician running for office.

This century has succeeded in turning sex into a trivial activity and an odious topic.

Modernity ingeniously finds a way not to present its theology directly, but rather through profane notions that imply it. It avoids announcing to man his divinity, but proposes goals that only a god could reach, or rather proclaims that the essence of man has rights which assume he is divine.

What we witness at the fea is not just a celebration of the multiplicity of modernities but also, and more importantly, a critical commentary on local structures of inequality that take for granted that both tradition and modernity are the prerogatives of the high ranking and wealthy.

in a postmodern world, even gods and sacred objects must travel or lose their vitality; any deity that remained stuck in its place and original purpose would soon become moribund.

Al-e-Ahmad explored the ideas of Marx; he translated Camus, and brought an intense focus to his reading of Heidegger (to whom he had been introduced at the University of Tehran by an influential specialist in German philosophy called Ahmad Fardid, who actually coined the term 'Westoxification'). These very modern critics of modernity's spiritual damage turned out to be stops on Al-e-Ahmad's journey to a conception of Islam itself as a revolutionary ideology.

In other words, in 1919 relatively few people could become disenchanted with liberal modernity because only a tiny minority had enjoyed the opportunity to become enchanted with it in the first place. Since then, however, billions more people have been exposed to the promises of individual freedom in a global neo-liberal economy that imposes constant improvisation and adjustment – and just as rapid obsolescence.

How could, it was felt, people be so opposed to modernity, and all the many goods it had to offer to people around the world: equality, liberty, prosperity, toleration, pluralism and representative government.

Looking not for "a self," that thing modernity keeps saying we're looking for when that is the last thing we need, choking on our individuality. Looking for his mind.

Bir düÅŸünün hele, bundan yüz y?l önce olan ya da böyle bir buluÅŸ konusu olan bir ÅŸey, bugün art?k bir Allah'?n kulunu bile heyecanland?ramayacak kadar s?radan hale geliyor.

Perhaps the world, incubating over Asiatic wisdom and Western science, will one day hatch out a civilization that will shame antiquity, deride modernity and amaze posterity.

Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.

Vol minachting keek hij naar al die waterhoofden waarin de slogans en gemeenplaatsen van een ten dode opgeschreven Systeem als kikkerdril samenklonterden en ronddreven. Naar die voortbrengers niet van de denkende, fijngevoelige, gecultiveerde, vrijheidslievende en schoonheidminnende mens, maar de van alle soorten banaalste en vulgairste: de Koopkrachtige Mens, de modale zaterdagmiddagklant van de Supermarkt. Wie niet kocht, bestond niet.

Father Polda smiled in the darkness. None of the saints had been left out. A big, generous man, he was meticulous with regard to the catalogue of the holy, and even though those whose duty it was to deal with witches and dragons might be thought to have been outmoded by the modernity that was coming to the mountains, he was glad they were still included for politeness' sake and memory of past favors, if nothing else.

I am not averse to generalizing the notion of "modern" to designate a certain way of life, rather than making it purely a synonym of 'contemporary'. There are moments and places in history to which 'we moderns' could return without too greatly disturbing the harmony of those times, without seeming objects infinitely curious and conspicuous... creatures shocking, dissonant, and unassailable.

El motor último del capitalismo no es, por tanto, la sed de ganancia ni ningún otro deseo humano, sino el desarrollo en cuanto entropía negativa. "El desarrollo no es un invento de los seres humanos. Los seres humanos son un invento del desarrollo" [Lyotard "Une fable postmoderne", en Moralités postmodernes pp. 86-87]

Two great critiques of modernity by biblical scholars are Walter Brueggemann's Texts Under Negotiation and Walter Wink's The Bible in Human Transformation.

was swiftly plain that life in After Covid Britain would be enduringly different from Before Covid Britain.