culture on Society

We are all to some extent the products of an exploitive society, and it would be foolish and self-defeating to pretend that we do not bear its stamp.

To know what, where, how, when, and with whom people eat is to know the character of their society.

Culture is not inherited like a genetic code. Instead, culture becomes layers and layers added by our society and our surrounding environment.

Mia koinonía megalónei ótan oi ilikioménoi fytévoun déntra ton opoíon i skiá gnorízoun óti den tha kathísoun poté. A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never ...

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

The city is the fulfillment of the purposes of the Eden of God. The city is the fulfiller of the paradise of God... which is tied to the future city with the original, sinless past of Eden and its res...

What makes an anxious society? We want to be different and stand out as unique without the presence of Jesus setting us apart.

We are a society that despises lack. We despise weakness and need and insufficiency. We turn the other way and pretend to be watching oncoming traffic when the red light halts us and the beggar reache...

As a society of unbelief, Western culture is devoid of a sense of journey, of adventure, because it lacks belief in much more than the cultivation of an ever-shrinking horizon of self-preservation and...

So it is that in most Western industrialized countries church and society have lost their identity, religion has become more and more a private affair, and morality has become secular. This process af...

From drugs and alcohol to TV and workaholism, we are increasingly a society that fulfills T.S. Eliot’s description of a people “distracted by distraction.” There is hardly a public menace we can name ...

The challenge each of these faced in their deconstruction—and what we may face—is walking the tightrope between becoming our own person and honoring our past. In The Homeless Mind , sociologist P...

We are taught, often by the tone of voice of the media and the politicians rather than by explicit argument, to bow down before…progress. It is unstoppable. Who wants to be left behind, to be behind t...

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...

The cathedral lay at the center of a society. Its structure told the story of the Christian narrative and the human journey. In its shadow people were formed inside a story about how life was best liv...

Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in [the twenty-first century] many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?

The great danger is to always single out some aspect of God’s good creation and identify it, rather than the alien intrusion of sin, as the villain. Such an error conceives of the good-evil dichotomy ...

On April 12, 1963, eight clergy—two Methodist bishops, two Episcopal bishops, one Roman Catholic Bishop, a Rabbi, a Presbyterian, and a Baptist—wrote a letter addressed to the citizens of Alabama. Thi...

Leader: God of mercy, we come before you with honest hearts. We bring not only our praise, but also our pain. We confess that at times we have lost heart. Hear now our lament, and kindle in us your ho...

There Are No Ordinary Things J. R. R. Tolkien tells a short story about an ordinary fellow who just wants to finish a painting. Over time, he is constantly distracted by the requests of his neighbors...

My Early Soundtrack What music shaped your early life? For most of us, our parents’ musical tastes probably were our starting place. That music made a deep impression on what we like — and don’t like...

Different Attitudes on Prayer This past Sunday was the first time I've been in worship at our local church in some time, and it was a wonderful service. The liturgy was inspiring, the praise musi...

Will Christians turn once again toward an approach that imposes its will on the rest of society? By doing so we would betray our founder, who resisted a temptation to authority over “all the kingdoms ...

In 1947, budding theologian Carl F. H. Henry wrote a short book titled The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. In it he surveys the American fundamentalist movement’s engagement with the most ...

Editors Note: This is perhaps less a review as a jumping off part to articulate some thoughts I developed while reading The Minority Experience. For a full review of the title, a cursory google search...

September 2018 The Millennial Stereotype There is perhaps no stronger stereotype of the millennial generation than that of “entitled.” For those of us who were born between 1981-1996, we’ve been lab...

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Albert Camus Two events recently collided in my mind and coalesced into this short essay: The first was a relatively in...

TV is imago populi—all of society’s trendy appetites incarnated into visible form and broadcasted.

Any religious movement which adopts a purely critical and negative attitude to culture is therefore a force of destruction and disintegration which mobilizes against it the healthiest and most constru...

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...