Quotes about Culture

It is an interesting observation on today's religious climate that many people now get every bit as steamed up about insisting that 'all religions are just the same' as the older dogmaticians did about insisting on particular formulations and interpretations. The dogma that all dogmas are wrong, the monolithic insistence that all monolithic systems are to be rejected, has taken hold of the popular imagination at a level far beyond rational or logical discourse.

At the individual level, the great controlling myth of our time has been the belief that within each of us there is a real, inner, private 'self', long buried beneath layers of socialization and attempted cultural and religious control, and needing to be rediscovered if we are to live authentic lives. When we 'discover' this 'true authentic self' , we must do whatever it dictates, even if it means ignoring the norms of the 'unenlightened' society all around us.

The Psalms offer us a way of joining in a chorus of praise and prayer that has been going on for millennia and across all cultures. Not to try to inhabit them, while continuing to invent nonpsalmic "worship" based on our own feelings of the moment, risks being like a spoiled child who, taken to the summit of Table Mountain with the city and the ocean spread out before him, refuses to gaze at the view because he is playing with his Game Boy.

Our philosophies have tended to split the world in two: "science" deals only with "hard facts," while the "arts" are imagined to deal in nebulous questions of inner meanings. Equally, in popular culture, inner feelings and motivations (" discovering who you really are" or "going with your heart") are regularly invoked as the true personal reality over against mere outward "identities.

The spiritual starvation diet offered by secularism made people so hungry that they now eat anything.

in the ancient Near East the idea of a single community across the traditional boundaries of culture, gender, and ethnic and social groupings was unheard of. Unthinkable, in fact. But there it was. A new kind of "family" had come into existence. Its focus of identity was Jesus; its manner of life was shaped by Jesus; its characteristic mark was believing allegiance to Jesus.

our confidence is not in the solidity of Western culture or the basic goodness of modern democracy. Our confidence is in Jesus and him alone.

I have argued elsewhere that it is time for a fresh integration of different modes and methods of study, taking full account of these cultural assumptions and allowing the texts themselves to offer their own challenge, their own alternative points of view.

What is needed is history, genuine history, multi-faceted history, 'thick description' history that takes seriously the full range of human life and culture.

The church doesn't have a monopoly on kitsch or sentimentalism, but if you want to find it, the church may well be the easiest place to start.)

From the beginning no serious Christian has been able to say 'This is my culture, so I must adapt the gospel to fit within it', just as no serious Christian has been able to say 'This is my surrounding culture, so I must oppose it tooth and nail'. Christians are neither chameleons, changing colour to suit their surroundings, nor rhinoceroses, ready to charge at anything in sight.

Part of the problem in our contemporary debates about asylum seekers or about the Middle East is that our politicians still want to present us with the dream of progress, the steady forward advance of the golden dream of freedom; and when the tide of human misery washes up on our beaches or when people in cultures very different from our own seem not to want the kind of freedom we had in mind, it is not just socially but ideologically untidy and inconvenient.