But Then It Didn’t

“A variant that was not sent down from the top was ‘the revolution of the sixties,’ a sort of Rousseauist hope that by destroying the ‘hypocrisy’ of petty bourgeois, Christian-tinged morality and conventions, a new ‘Age of Aquarius’ would drop down out of somewhere” (Harold O.J. Brown, The Sensate Culture, p. 229).

In Other Words, No More Than a Quarter Inch Deep

[Speaking of 1 Peter 3:3] “Women in the Roman world used to really ‘crank up the volume’ in their personal appearance. The problem addressed by Peter is not hair-arrangements in themselves, or the perfidy of pony-tails. No, Peter is directing his attention to women who were ostentatious, making a display of themselves. The women of …

Sickly Recluse Is Right

“We were fully in the modern age; the primitiveness and squalor of the Middle Ages had been left behind. The poet Swinburne proclaimed, ‘Glory to man in the highest, for man is the maker of things. Whitman sang of himself, and Nietzsche, a sickly recluse, wrote ecstatically of the Superman” (Harold O.J. Brown, The Sensate …

Yeah, But the Incoherence Is HD on a Plasma Flat Screen

“The governments of Western countries do not have propaganda machines like Dr. Goebbels’, but all of Western culture is permeated by mass communications and round-the-clock entertainment. Whole populations are effectively anesthetized; independent thinking becomes rare; slogans replace thought; and logical analysis virtually ceases to exist” (Harold O.J. Brown, The Sensate Culture, p. 115).

Not the First Time We’ve Been Here

“Although it began at a time when the older idealistic view was already being replaced by a sensate mentality, the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century reasserted an ideational worldview, placing great emphasis upon God, his will, and his Word . . . The Protestant Christianity of the Reformation represented a far-reaching effort to reverse …

Why There’s 57 Channels and Nothing On

“Only in this century did the techniques of recording, film, television, and video make art, music, and literature in all their forms—from the highest and most cultivated to the lowest and crudest—accessible to virtually every member of society, even teenagers and young children . . . This vastly increased availability of every form of art …