human nature on Western Culture

Historically the West has tended to throw its chief emphasis upon doing and the East upon being. . . . Were human nature perfect there would be no discrepancy between being and doing. The unfallen man...

Jean-Dominique Bauby was widely esteemed as one of France’s most prolific and influential journalists. His work widely shaped the quickly evolving cultural landscape of Europe during the 1980s and ’90...

What is the matter with us is a question as old as time. Many philosophers and prophets believe they have an answer, but so too does holy scripture. According to the Dutch-Canadian philosopher Al Wolt...

Worldviews are like belly buttons. Everyone has one, but we don’t talk about them very often. Or perhaps it would be better to say that worldviews are like cerebellums: everyone has one and we can’t l...

Before my mentor, Dallas Willard, passed over to glory, I asked him what he thought about the rapid rise of the Christian spiritual formation movement. He said, “It is a wonderful thing, but my fear i...

On August 20 and September 5, 1977, two spacecraft named Voyager were launched. Eventually leaving the solar system and heading into deep space, they represented a revolutionary and promising breakthr...

The scholastics used to say: Homo non proprie humanus sed superhumanus est —which means that to be properly human, you must go beyond the merely human.

For most of the late twentieth century, political scientists embraced blank-slate theories in which people soaked up the ideology of their parents or the TV programs they watched. Some political scien...

The journalist Andrew Sullivan has some strong words of advice for the modern church,  If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, p...

Man is pushed by drives. But he is pulled by values.

Some skeptics today speak about “evolving” from a primitive condition, but the Bible (Romans 1:18-32) sadly portrays a  descent  rather than an ascent. The result has been given the theological term “...

The one essential condition of human existence is that man should always be able to bow down before something infinitely great. If men are deprived of the infinitely great they will not go on living a...

The animated movie WALL-E is a cute story of a curious robot whose job is to clean up a trashed earth. While humans once inhabited the earth, we soon discover they have been evacuated from earth with ...

The only thing that separates us from the animals is our ability to accessorize.

Weeping is perhaps the most human and universal of all relief measures.

Human kind cannot bear very much reality.

We admit that the same nature exists in every race, and the same virtue.

Human flourishing is first and foremost a flourishing of relationships—our relationship with God and with others. But human flourishing is also a product of fruitful work that reflects our God who wor...

From a purely biological point of view man is not at home anywhere in the world.

Survival requires more than the basic biological necessities we readily acknowledge—oxygen, food, and water. It also demands something less tangible but equally vital: hope. When hope vanishes, the hu...

Leo Tolstoy, the writer of some of the most beautiful and complex stories in literature, had this to say on the topic of human nature and qualities that define us: One of the commonest and most gene...

I am a human being, not a human doing.

If you were to travel back in time to the city of Rome (either during the Republic or the Empire), you may have had the opportunity to witness the Triumph, a colossal spectacle in which the greatest m...

When Julius Caesar returned to Rome after many years of fighting its battles abroad, he planned great festivities and triumphal processions to celebrate his victories over Gaul, Egypt, Pontos, and Afr...

Man becomes human with the eating of bread.

In his poem Cocktail Party , T. S. Eliot captures a fundamental truth about human nature and the source of much hurt in the world. People’s actions are rarely driven by outright malice—intended t...

Every human being, each in their own way, has the same glory, and this glory is incomparably greater than the glory of any distinction they could struggle themselves into.

First, we do not believe that strong convictions cause incivility. Instead, we believe poorly formed convictions cause incivility.

The human capacity for burden is like bamboo – far more flexible than you’d ever believe at first glance.

Dangerous levels of exhaustion usually accumulate over a longer period of time in which we are consistently living beyond human limits, functioning outside our giftedness, or not paying attention to t...