"[Psychologist W.H.R. Rivers concludes that the Melanesians] are dying from pure boredom. When every theatre has been replaced by 100 cinemas, when every musical instrument has been replaced by 100 gramophones, when every horse has been replaced by 100 cheaper motor-cars, when electrical ingenuity has made it possible for every child to hear its bedtime stories from a loudspeaker...it will not be surprising if the population of the entire civilised world rapidly follows the fate of the Melanesians.'"
~~ Eliot's memorial to Marie Lloyd, 1923 (included in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot)
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 04, 2016
Monday, September 19, 2011
Favourite recent read: Serious Times, serious ideas
"God calls us to live large on the very stage we find ourselves. God has placed us in this very situation to infuse it with meaning and significance. This enables us to live for Christ now rather than waiting for a set of circumstances we imagine will allow us to serve him in the future. This simple but profound attitude has marked many of the great lives...."The best book I've read lately...really the best...is Serious Times: Making Your Life Matter in an Urgent Day, by James Emery White, published in 2004.
I'm not sure if I'd ever read anything by Dr. White before. I didn't go looking for him. The book turned up in a pile of "religious non-fiction" I was pricing at the thrift store. I liked the look of it and decided to buy it myself.
The Amazon reviews are pretty right on. To say it's an entertaining book (as someone there said) might sound like you were doing it an injustice (I mean, the title is Serious Times); but it is written in an engaging and readable style. Good thought stuff, good faith stuff, good life stuff. I especially liked the chapter on "Developing Our Minds." Here's a quote from that chapter:
"Beyond engaging various fields of thought, it is critical to be able to think about our faith in relation to its significance. In dialogue with the world, the deepest question regarding the Christian faith is 'So what?' This simple question gets to the heart of not only thinking Christianly but communicating Christianity itself....The Christian mind must understand the significance [of the resurrection] in order to offer it to the world. If we cannot, we will have lost our place in the most critical of conversations--indeed, the only conversation that matters."This one is a keeper. I'd like to figure out a way to use it for an adult Sunday School class. It would also be a great addition to a highschool worldview course.
One more quote:
"By nature we tend to adapt, to conform, to our surroundings. There are only two forces shaping us: one is the world and the other is the will of God. If we are to avoid becoming in the surrounding culture, we must take a stand. That stand comes through the renewing of our minds....Taken into prayer, ideas become real, life-changing, dynamic. Then, and only then, they change my life."
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Charlotte Mason #21: A Lovely Thought
"[People need] the cultivation of the power to appreciate, to enjoy, whatever is just, true, and beautiful in thought and expression. For instance, one man reads--
'...He lay along,
Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out
Upon the brook that brawls along this wood;
To the which place a poor sequester'd stag,
That from the hunter's aim had ta'en a hurt,
Did come to languish;'--
"and gets no more out of it than the four facts of the reclining man, the oak, the brook, and the wounded stag. Another reads, and gets these and something over--a delicious mental image, and a sense of exquisite pleasure in the putting of the thought, the mere ordering of the words....If people are to live in order to get rich, rather than to enjoy satisfaction in the living, they can do very well without intellectural culture; but if we are to make the most of life as the days go on, then it is a duty to put this power of getting enjoyment into the hands of the young....But the press and hurry of our times and the clamour for useful knowledge are driving classical culture out of the field; and parents will have to make up their minds, not only that they must supplement the moral training of the school, but must supply the intellectual culture, without which knowledge may be power, but is not pleasure, nor the means of pleasure." -- Charlotte Mason, Formation of Character
'...He lay along,
Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out
Upon the brook that brawls along this wood;
To the which place a poor sequester'd stag,
That from the hunter's aim had ta'en a hurt,
Did come to languish;'--
"and gets no more out of it than the four facts of the reclining man, the oak, the brook, and the wounded stag. Another reads, and gets these and something over--a delicious mental image, and a sense of exquisite pleasure in the putting of the thought, the mere ordering of the words....If people are to live in order to get rich, rather than to enjoy satisfaction in the living, they can do very well without intellectural culture; but if we are to make the most of life as the days go on, then it is a duty to put this power of getting enjoyment into the hands of the young....But the press and hurry of our times and the clamour for useful knowledge are driving classical culture out of the field; and parents will have to make up their minds, not only that they must supplement the moral training of the school, but must supply the intellectual culture, without which knowledge may be power, but is not pleasure, nor the means of pleasure." -- Charlotte Mason, Formation of Character
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