Quotes about Culture

Western people are a ritually starved people, and in this are different than most of human history.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803—1882), the great American essayist, said "nothing great is ever achieved without enthusiasm." What a deconstructed culture lacks, because of its deep cynicism and pessimism about reality, is a basic confidence and enthusiasm that is necessary to start almost anything.

The trouble is that we have made the Bible into a bunch of ideas—about which we can be right or wrong—rather than an invitation to a new set of eyes. Even worse, many of those ideas are the same, old tired ones, mirroring the reward and punishment system of the dominant culture, so that most people don't even expect anything good or anything new from the momentous revelation that we call the Bible. The

We ended up spreading our national cultures under the rubric of Jesus, instead of a universally liberating message under the name of Christ.

All societies are addicted to themselves and create deep codependency on them.

is actually undoing the fourth commandment of Moses, which tells us to "honor your father and mother"? This commandment is necessary for the first half of life, and, one hopes, it can be possible forever. As we move into the second half of life, however, we are very often at odds with our natural family and the "dominant consciousness" of our cultures.

A sacred myth keeps a people healthy, happy, and whole—even inside their pain. They give deep meaning, and pull us into "deep time" (which encompasses all time, past and future, geological and cosmological, and not just our little time or culture).

I cannot think of a culture in human history, before the present postmodern era, that did not value law, tradition, custom, authority, boundaries, and morality of some clear sort. These containers give us the necessary security, continuity, predictability, impulse control, and ego structure that we need, before the chaos of real life shows up.

Time is exactly what we do not have. What decreases in a culture of affluence is precisely and strangely time—along with wisdom and friendship. These are the very things that the human heart was created for, that the human heart feeds on and lives for. No wonder we are producing so many depressed, unhealthy and even violent people, while also leaving a huge carbon footprint on this poor planet.

Like the Christ Mystery itself, the deep feminine often works underground and in the shadows, and—from that position—creates a much more intoxicating message. While church and culture have often denied the Divine Feminine roles, offices, and formal authority, the feminine has continued to exercise incredible power at the cosmic and personal levels.

Abba is the word that Jesus used to connote safety and endearment. It is actually a child's word, closest to Papa or Daddy. But unfortunately, it suffers today from centuries of being heard (and used) inside patriarchal cultures, implicitly validating a hierarchical worldview.

If our postmodern world seems highly subject to cynicism, skepticism, and what it does not believe in, if we now live in a post-truth America, then we "believers" must take at least partial responsibility for aiming our culture in this sad direction. The best criticism of the bad is still the practice of the better.