Now that my Wal Mart master plan has been exposed, the time has come for me to reveal my ownership and backing of the Moscow Civic Association. So I confess it. The whole thing was my idea . . . kind of a back-handed way of making Moscow liberals look bad. Just get them in …
Worldliness and Modernity
“Worldliness is what makes sin look normal in any age and righteousness seem odd. Modernity is worldliness, and it has concealed its values so adroitly in the abundance, the comfort, and the wizardry of our age that even those who call themselves the people of God seldom recognize them for what they are.” [David Wells, …
Yeat’s Falcon
“We are like Yeat’s falcon, increasingly oblivious to the voice of the falconer. The center no longer holds. All is flung to the periphery, where its meaning is lost . . . We have become T.S. Eliot’s ‘hollow men,’ without weight, for whom appearance and image must suffice.” [David Wells, God in the Wasteland (Grand …
Copyright Stuff
For those who are interested in the legal and ethical issues surrounding copyrights, particularly with regard to the republication of old public domain stuff, should check this out.
Me and WalMart
Controversy is swirling around me again, and so I must break my silence. According to a thread on a local listserv, apparently my tentacles extend into the corporate offices of WalMart. It seems, according to this breathless analysis, that I am orchestrating a plot in which I am helping to bring a Super WalMart to …
Audible Confetti
“The public sphere, dominated as it is by the omnipresence of bureaucracy, systems of manufacturing, the machinery of capitalism, and the audible confetti spewing out of countless radios and television makes it virtually impossible to think that in this world God has any meaningful place. He may have a place somewhere, but not here, not …
Postmodernity: Modernity’s Hiccup
“I have spoken of the emergence of the global cliché culture as the birthmark of Our Time. Until modernity was ushered into our world, cultures were always local. They were, by definition, sets of meanings and morals, beliefs and habits that arose in specific contexts of history and religion, a people’s social organization and place …
Convenience Store Therapy
“Television entertainments tend to avoid problems that can’t be solved by the end of the hour.” [David Wells, No Place for Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993), p. 200.]
The “Malady” of Modesty
“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. …