“It is still possible to find the tough, affirmative spirit of the blues in contemporary forms. But increasingly, that spirit is rejected in favor of antimusical, antisocial antics that would be laughable if they weren’t so offensive” (Martha Bayles, Hole in our Soul, p. 3).
Why Everything is So Mud Fence Ugly Now
“A breach has been made with the past, which allows us to envisage a new aspect of architecture corresponding to the technical civilization of the age we live in; the morphology of dead styles has been destroyed; and we are returning to honesty of thought and feeling” (Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, …
Roses and Dew
“Since the death of the apostles all preaching has been uninspired preaching. But God, in His inspired Word, commands uninspired men to teach His Word. Lack of inspiration means that error can creep in, and looking around at the modern Church, we see that a great deal has. Because of the possibility of erroneous preaching, …
One City, Many Shapes
“Babylon, Venice, Paris, New York — they are all the same city, only one Babel always reappearing, a city from the4 beginning mortally wounded: ‘and they left off building the city'” (Ellul, The Meaning of the City, p. 21).
Puritan Ceremonial
“We do not — at least that class of Englishmen who study literature do not — perform ceremonies gracefully, nor attend them with much enthusiasm, and we doubt whether any ceremony can modify the nature of the act which it accompanies. The Elizabethan sentiment was very different. About ceremonies in the Church there might be …
Well, It Seemed Like a Good Idea
“Individual imagination and fancy will more and more take possession of the technical resources of the new architecture, of its spatial harmonies, of its functional qualities, and will use them as the ground work, or rather framework, of a new beauty which will crown this expected renascence with splendour” (Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and …
The Mother of the City of Man
“Babylon, the great city, or Babylon the Great. The biggest in the world. No one can rival her, not even Rome. Not because of her historical greatness, but because of what she represents mythically. All the cities in the world are brought together in her, she is the synthesis of them all” (Ellul, The Meaning …
The Medieval City
“In this, the medieval city was more completely a commonwealth — a full communion and communication of social goods — than any society that has ever existed with the exception of the Greek polis, and it was superior even to the latter, inasmuch as it was not the society of a leisured class supported by …
Psalms as Musical Ballast
“Without a restoration of the psalms to an honored place in worship, our musical worship of the Lord will continue to have the gravitas of a glad bag full of styrofoam packing peanuts” (Mother Kirk, p. 138).
What God Hath Scattered, Let No Man Gather
“Men can live in their towers, they can build their skyscrapers and their giant cities, they can cover the world with a web of interlocking cities, but these have no more meaning for them. Babel will never be finished” (Jacques Ellul, The Meaning of the City, p. 19).