Quotes about Culture

The problem with race in America is not fundamentally a problem of skin. It is a problem of sin. It is a problem in that people have not been willing to address the sin that has led to a division among skin as we hold tenaciously to our cultures. Our backgrounds and preferences are legitimate, but when they overrule God, that's when Jesus says, "You are wrong.

What I'm doing is art - it's low-brow art but there's a magic in that.

the twenty-first-century evangelical church is on the verge of selling its Protestant birthright, sola scriptura, for a mess of pottage, sola cultura.

North Americans think they know how to speak Christian, but what they say is actually a gross distortion. Either people do not know Christian words at all, or they have heard them but do not know what they mean, or they think they know what they mean when in fact they mean something completely different.

We live in a culture that desires intimacy without responsibility and pleasure without commitment.

Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh' (Genesis 2:24 NRSV). This radically upside-down statement would have shocked the original readers of Genesis and should shock us too. I don't know of any culture where men are depicted as clinging to their wives. Certainly within a patriarchal world, this is getting things backwards. There the wife leaves her parents and is absorbed into her husband's family.

European man has convinced himself that in order to be modern and free, he must be radically secular. That conviction has had crucial, indeed lethal, consequences or European public life and European culture.

We merely want to live in peace with all the world, to trade with them, to commune with them, to learn from their culture as they may learn from ours, so that the products of our toil may be used for our schools and our roads and our churches and not for guns and planes and tanks and ships of war.

There is no hierarchy of values by which one culture has the right to insist on all its own values and deny those of another.

As the Spanish proverb says, 'He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.' So it is with traveling. A man must carry knowledge with him if he would bring home knowledge.

When two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather.

Languages are the pedigree of nations.