Quotes about Culture

Abba is the word that Jesus used to connote safety and endearment. It is actually a child's word, closest to Papa or Daddy. But unfortunately, it suffers today from centuries of being heard (and used) inside patriarchal cultures, implicitly validating a hierarchical worldview.

If our postmodern world seems highly subject to cynicism, skepticism, and what it does not believe in, if we now live in a post-truth America, then we "believers" must take at least partial responsibility for aiming our culture in this sad direction. The best criticism of the bad is still the practice of the better.

Wholeness and holiness will stretch us beyond our small comfort zone. How could they not? There are few in our religious culture who understand the necessity of mature internalised conscience. So wise guides are hard to find. You will have more Aarons building you golden calves than Moses leading you on any Exodus.

As Carol Bialock writes in her poem, we cannot stop the drowning waters of our addictive culture from rising, but we must at least see our reality for what it is, seek to properly detach from it, build a coral castle, and learn to breathe under water. The New Testament called this salvation (some might call it enlightenment); the Twelve Step Program calls it recovery.

Cultural lies conform us, but eternal truths transform us.

Well, I think indigenous peoples have ways of living on the Earth that they've had forever. And they've been overrun by organized religion, which has had a lot of money and power.

The Americans have no faith, they rely on the power of a dollar; they are deaf to sentiment.

If there is one thing in this planet that has the power to bind people it is soccer.

The result is that in the Christian world in the West, we settle for a cultural version of Christianity that is far from the real thing.

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spoke: the faith and morals hold which Milton held.

Some Americans need hyphens in their names, because only part of them has come over; but when the whole man has come over, heart and thought and all, the hyphen drops of its own weight out of his name.

He is not a true man of the world who knows only the present fashions of it.