“In this sense, all culture is a conversation or, more precisely, a corporation of conversations, conducted in a variety of symbolic modes. Our attention here is on how forms of public discourse regulate and even dictate what kind of content can issue from such forms” (Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 6).
Overspecification
“But the principle of intelligible worship does not require separate services for valley girls or bureaucrats or any other subgroup with its own jargon. Paul was maintaining that services for Americans should not be held in Chinese, not that surfers should get their own church” (Mother Kirk, p. 124).
Huxley and Orwell
“Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy . . . This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right” (Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. vii-viii).
Paedobaptism and Porcupines
“The hermeneutic of requiring express warrant from Scripture for all elements of a worship service is essentially a baptistic approach. For example, because we have no express mention of infant baptism in the New Testament, infant baptism is prohibited. Presbyterian strict regulativists try to get away from this by allowing for express warrant through ‘good …
Obvious When You Think About It
“Television is not vulgar because people are vulgar; it is vulgar because people are similar in their prurient interests and sharply differentiated in their civilized concerns” (George Gilder, Life After Television, p. 48).
Big Brother”s Eyeball
“Yet television is at its heart a totalitarian medium. Because television signals originate at a single station and are sent top-down to the masses, tyrants everywhere push TV sets onto their people” (George Gilder, Life After Television, p. 46).
Not Tepid Water
“The point is to fill the day with godly celebration, rest, feasting. Sabbath keeping is the best wine, not tepid water. Observed the right way, the children in the home should grow up longing for the Lord’s Day to come. Remember that in obeying this commandment, we must not turn aside either to the right …
Down in the Cultural Bilge
“People have little in common except their prurient interests and morbid fears and anxieties. Necessarily aiming its fare at this lowest-common-denominator target, television gets worse and worse year after year” (George Gilder, Life After Television, p. 15).
Not A Great Man for Bones
“I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially to the extent to which it’s been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books in the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has. I think …
Crowns Roll in the Dust
“The world’s way of responding to intimations of decay is to engage equally in idiot hopes and idiot despair . . . In Christian terms, such hopes and fears are equally beside the point. As Christians we know that here we have no continuing city, that crowns roll in the dust and every earthly kingdom …