“The moral hedges that surrounded our collective life have been trampled down. That is the paramount truth. What once was sublimated is now, in all of its raw and often violent nature, spewed forth in the name of liberty or self-expression. What once had to be private is now paraded publicly for the gallery of …
Culture As Cop
“Culture, then, is the outward discipline in which inherited meanings and morality, beliefs and ways of behaving are preserved . . . It is what tells us what owning a Cadillac means, what significance being gay has, how we can measure someone whom we learn is a doctor, an engineer, a street artist, or homeless. …
How the Center Gave Way
“The collapse of the Western mind after Kant then scattered the human enterprise of understanding to the four winds. The falcon, moving in ever wider circles on the winds of modernity, has lost the voice of the falconer, the whole process greatly accelerated by the growing accumulations of knowledge in all fields that are stored …
The Great Bluff
“I am using the term secularism, then, to refer to the values of the modern age, especially where these lead to the restructuring of thought and life to accommodate the absence or irrelevance of God. Secularization is the process that creates the public environment in which these values seem natural and inevitable” [David Wells, No …
Come Again?
“In literature, a whole generation of deconstructionists has emerged within the universities who, despite their calling to be the custodians of the nation’s language, now make their living by denying that words have any meaning at all.” [David Wells, No Place for Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993), p. 65.]
Poster Boy
“It is, in fact, this assumption of an ability to move from one plateau of achievement to another that has given us a need always to be post: we feel compelled to assure ourselves that we are post-Puritan, post-Christian, and post-modern. Our world is post-industrial and post-business. Our time is post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, and post-Cold War.” …
Worldliness and Faux Innocence
“The stream of historic orthodoxy that once watered the evangelical soul is now dammed by a worldliness that many fail to recognize as worldliness because of the cultural innocence with which it presents itself.” [David Wells, No Place for Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993), p. 11.]
The Lewis and Clark of the Soul
“Lewis and Clark didn’t return from their trip and say, ‘Well, we didn’t find the Northwest Passage, but we did find ourselves.’ But that is the spirit of Bobo travel. Our travel dollars are investments in our own human capital. We don’t just want to see famous sights; we want to pierce into other cultures. …
Ah, Texture
“But to demonstrate their superiority to such people, the educated elites prefer to build environments full of natural irregularities. For the Bobos, roughness connotes authenticity and virtue. So the educated elites love texture . . . Really rich Bobos will hire squads of workmen with ball-peen hammers to pound some rustic wear into their broad …
Simple Rhythms of Life
“The educated class has conquered all and hegemonized its Bobo culture over affluent regions from coast to coast. Now the Babbitt lion can mingle with the beatnik lamb at a Pottery Barn, a Smith & Hawken, a Museum Shop, a Restoration Hardware, a Nature Company, a Starbucks, or any of the other zeitgeist-heavy institutions that …