Quotes about Culture

The Hindus are not looking for us to send them men who will build schools and hospitals, although those things are good and useful in themselves--and perhaps very badly needed in India: they want to know if we have any saints to send them.

our material riches unfortunately imply a spiritual, cultural, and moral poverty that are perhaps far greater than we see.

I have come to think that care of the soul requires a high degree of resistance to the culture around us, simply because that culture is dedicated to values that have no concern for the soul.

The Jews were the first monotheistic culture in history. They believed in one God and one God only. The Greco-Roman world of Herod's day was polytheistic. They believed in many gods, and much of their worship was sexual in nature.

Good storytelling is one thing rural whites and Indians have in common. But native Americans have learned through harsh necessity that people who survive encroachment by another culture need story to survive. And a storytelling tradition is something Plains people share with both ancient and contemporary monks; we learn our ways of being and reinforce our values by telling tales about each other.

In our culture, time can seem like an enemy....But the monastic perspective welcomes time as a gift from God and seeks to put it to good use rather than allowing us to be used up by it.....Liturgical time is essentially poetic time, oriented toward process rather than productivity, willing to wait attentively in stillness, rather than always pushing to get the job done

Nowadays many in America seem to regard "Christian" as synonymous with "fundamentalist," an error the media seems bent on perpetuating. The fact that Islam is generally treated with the same ignorance offers me no comfort.

Prayer is often stereotyped in our culture as a form of pietism, a lamentable privatization of religion. Even many Christians seem to regard prayer as a grocery list we hand to God, and when we don't get what we want, we assume that the prayers didn't "work." This is privatization at its worst, and a cosmic selfishness.

This is what we see in our own modern secular culture where millions of babies are aborted (murdered through child sacrifice) every year through state-funded organizations like Planned Parenthood! The population of the USA has lost over 55 million people to abortion since the Supreme Court permitted the murder of babies in 1973 (and counting).

James Ussher states in The Epistle to the Reader of his treatise The Annals of the World: Moreover, we find that the years of our forefathers, the years of the ancient Egyptians and Hebrews, were the same length as the Julian year. It consisted of twelve months containing thirty days each. (It cannot be proven that the Hebrews used lunar months before the Babylonian captivity.) Five days were added after the twelfth month each year. Every four years, six days were added after the twelfth month.

We do not need more intellectual power; we need more moral power. We do not need more knowledge; we need more character. We do not need more government; we need more culture. We do not need more law; we need more religion. We do not need more of the things that are seen; we need more of the things that are unseen

Why did they have so many clothes, anyway? Life was so much easier in India, where a boy needed only a pair of shorts.