“It was in Africa that I first discovered that bourgeois virtues are not only desirable but often heroic” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, p. 25).
Oysters Whistle Out of Tune
“Oysters always whistle out of tune, and we should not be surprised when men cannot accomplish their own salvation. We should not marvel that men cannot restore and reform the Church . . . With our indistinct mutterings, we have ‘preached’ our way into a culture that we deserve. Because we are the problem, we …
The Wrong Units of Measurement
“It is only the sentimentalist who imagines that the profundity of a person’s response to tragedy is proportional to the length, volume, or shrillness of his lamentation” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, p. 20).
He Gives More Stones
“Who has given us all these pseudo-men, who caper so prettily on the stage for the televangelistic cameras? The Lord is clearly angry with us. Who was it that deceided that churches should start having Super Bowl parties instead of the Word and sacraments? This is nothing less than the hand of God upon us. …
Puritan Greatness With Words
“But on almost any view, Tyndale who inaugurated, and the Genevan translators who first seriously advance, our tradition, tower head and shoulders above all others whom I have yet mentioned” (C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the 16th Century, p. 211).
Contempt for the Poor
“But there is little doubt that an oppositional attitude toward traditional social rules is what wins the modern intellectual his spurs, in the eyes of other intellectuals. And the prestige that intellectuals confer upon antinomianism soon communicates itself to nonintellectuals. What is good for the bohemian sooner or later becomes good for the unskilled worker, …
Blinkered Be-Bop
“All our scholars, statesmen, politicians, bureaucrats, philosophers, musicians, painters, and anchormen haven’t a clue. The bugle blows indistinctly, and we all think it is a new form of jazz” (Mother Kirk, p. 205).
The Low Bottom of the Heart
“Where Tyndale is most continuously and obviously superior to More is in style. He is, beyond comparison, lighter, swifter, more economical . . . What we miss in Tyndale is the many-sidedness, the elbow-room of More’s mind; what we miss in More is the joyous, lyric quality of Tyndale. The sentences that stick to the …
Distinguishable, Not Separable
“My contention is that there should be no such disjunction between the ‘appeal’ and the preaching, any more than there should be between the sacraments and preaching” (Lloyd-Jones, Preachers and Preaching, p. 274).
When Conscience Cannot be Denied
“It is a little like watching the Texas Chainsaw Massacre over and over again and watching the hippies drawn inexorably to their doom in the uncanny house . . . that has become not a place of refuge, but of slaughter instead. That house is our culture. We are all being led into that house …