arts and culture on Standards

In Words We Live By, Brian Burrell tells of an armed robber named Dennis Lee Curtis who was arrested in 1992 in Rapid City, South Dakota. Curtis apparently had scruples about his thievery. In his wal...

The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the o...

Gracious God, you call us to a life of intimate relationship with you and with one another. You call us to a life of community, where we actively seek the needs of others before our own. We acknowledg...

What was the sense in saying that the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to be have practiced? If they had no notion of wha...

But even in the much-publicized rebellion of the young against the materialism of the affluent society, the consumer mentality is too often still intact: the standards of behavior are still those of k...

**Spoiler Alert:**This review contains some minor spoilers about the plot of Ted Lasso . Content Alert: Ted Lasso contains adult themes, sexual content, and strong language. I’ve read at least ...

No one likes to talk about human population. Christians in particular are rightly wary of the ways in which population discussions have sometimes served to denigrate the value of human life and the bl...

As we are increasingly caught by love, our usual standards of efficiency will take a beating. . . . There are points where I may need to become a little less job-efficient if I want to be more loving.

All great jazz musicians have at least three things in common: (1) they have gone into the practice room and learned and internalized all the scales, which are simply organized sequences of notes, unt...

Becoming a Navy Seal is considered the most challenging training of any military unit in the U.S. military. And as difficult as most of their training is, nothing can compare to BUDS, which stands for...

Culture consists of concepts, values, and assumptions about life that guide behavior and are widely shared by people. . . . [These] are transmitted generation to generation, rarely with explicit instr...

I am programmed to expect that the world is what I can see, touch, and measure.

Leadership is often a matter of failing people’s expectations at a rate they can stand.

All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.

Leader: Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience All: bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against an...

When gradations are placed on culture, we begin to put value judgments on which one is superior to another. For example, in All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes, Kenneth Myers asserts that there ar...

Rules for Self Discovery: What we want most; What we think about most; How we use our money; What we do with our leisure time; The company we enjoy; Who and what we admire; What we laugh at.

I believe the target of anything in life should be to do it so well that it becomes an art.

The distinction between drugs that are considered legal or illegal in a given society is often based on much more than just scientific information. Traditions, economics, religion, and the popular med...

Stories, after all, are one of the most basic modes of human life and are a characteristic expression of worldview. Human life is constituted by a series of stories, implicit and explicit, that makes ...

In order to exercise leadership on that challenge, they had to go beyond what people expected of them, risk testing some relationships, and move themselves and their organizations into unfamiliar terr...

Culture is a historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which people communicate, perpetuate, and devel...

The final thing leaders will need is courage … the willingness to tell the truth, to say what is not politely or politically acceptable. … The most common expression of the courage to tell the truth i...

Good farmers, who take seriously their duties as stewards of Creation and of their land's inheritors, contribute to the welfare of society in more ways than society usually acknowledges, or even k...

You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.

While formally or structurally speaking, there are mechanisms of discipline operative in both the convent and the prison, in both the factory and the monastery, more specifically, these disciplines an...

Systems are perfectly designed to get the results they are getting.

Things are not ends in themselves; they are means to greater attachment to others. . . . But to have a good relationship with others, it is necessary to have a proper relationship with things.

A society is defined not only by what it creates, but also what it refuses to destroy.

Our culture is no longer banded together by shared beliefs; it’s drawn together by shared spectacles. Like Halloween costumes designed to match the most popular movies, we seek our self-identity insid...