“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).
Sin and Grace as Culturally Potent
“The Augustinian theology and philosophy of history with their intense realization of the burden of inherited evil under which the human race laboured and their conception of divine grace as a continually renewed source of supernatural energy which transforms human nature and changes the course of history—all this had become part of the spiritual patrimony …
Decorations or Strategy?
“Too often we act as though our differences over liturgy were simply differences over decoration, instead of differences over effective strategy in the midst of a fearful war. There should be no disagreement over whether the warfare of an army should be coordinated or not” (Mother Kirk, p. 137).
This Explains a Lot of Things, Actually
“Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing concentric circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird” (Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to …
Galloping Legalism
“We should therefore see that there are two types of order. When a formal church is unhealthy, it is because their arrangement is the order of china figurines on a shelf. When a formal church is obedient and healthy it is because their arrangement is that of well-disciplined troops preparing themselves for battle. An opposing …
Piety in the Rat Race
“I do not insist that you live in the mountains and the deserts but that you be good and moderate and chaste, while dwelling in the midst of the city” (Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew).
Let Us Make a Name
“And it is this solidarity in a name, this unity in separation from God, which was to keep men from ever again being separated on earth. And the sign and symbol of this enterprise is the city they wanted to build together” (Ellul, The Meaning of the City, p. 16).