progress on Brokenness of the World

In the land whose founding metaphor was the mutuality of John Winthrop’s seventeenth-century vision of a “city set on a hill,” we live more and more in estranged, hostile, exclusive enclaves, linked o...

The modern world has had far too little understanding of the art of keeping young. Its notion of progress has been to pile one thing on top of another, without caring if each thing was crushed in turn...

We were created for goodness and perfection. That’s why we innovate, progress, and change. But if our progress loses its purpose, it cannibalizes our humanity, leaving us distracted and disoriented.

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

“We have laboured long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors.”

The myth of progress has deep roots in contemporary Western culture, and some of those roots are Christian…This utopian dream is in fact a parody of the Christian vision. The kingdom of God and the ki...

Yet despite all of these advancements, we are more discontent than ever. Gregg Easterbrook wrote a book on this very topic entitled The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. ...

R. C. Sproul observes that there are similarities between the sanctification of the Christian believer and the travails of Sisyphus. He was the Greek hero forever doomed to roll a boulder up a hill ag...

Restlessness is discontent — and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man — and I will show you a failure.”

Here is the heart of the paradox: Technology is a brilliant, praiseworthy expression of human creativity and cultivation of the world. But it is at best neutral in actually forming human beings who ca...

You may feel as if you are sitting still right now, but it’s an illusion of miraculous proportions. Planet Earth is spinning around its axis at a speed of 1,000 miles per hour. Every 24 hours, planet ...

Pilgrimage is centered around one thing—progression. God does not call us to be static saints, even if we cannot move physically. We are constantly on the move spiritually, evolving in our understandi...

Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far m...

There is no way out, only a way forward.

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

If there is one word that sums up how many of us feel about technology and family life, it’s Help! Parents know we need help.  We love the way devices make our lives easier amid the stress and busy...

The life of people on earth is obviously better now than it has ever been—certainly much better than it was 500 years ago when people beat each other with cats. This may sound silly but now and then w...

Obviously there’s a lot of good things about societal and technological progress, and in a lot of ways our lives are much easier than, say, our grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ lives. But there’s ...

To progress is always to begin always to begin again.

Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward.”

Real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them as from a root.

Progress is not an illusion; it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

At every point in the human journey we find that we have to let go in order to move forward; and letting go means dying a little. In the process we are being created anew, awakened afresh to the sourc...

With vainglory, we crave notice of our achievements with pride, we take full credit for the progress we have made and do not think that God has been involved at all, let alone been our indispensible h...

Qui cessat esse melior cessat esse bonus (He who ceases to be better ceases to be good)

“And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.”

“Yes, yes, I see it all! — an enormous social activity, a mighty civilization, a profuseness of science, of art, of industry, of morality, and afterwords, when we have filled the world with industrial...

“If only I had some grease I could fix some kind of a light," Ma considered. "We didn't lack for light when I was a girl before this newfangled kerosene was ever heard of." "Th...

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.