“O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, has there ever been another place on earth where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested as within thy blessed borders today? I doubt it seriously. Every child goes to school in a …
Is the Moon Really Necessary?
“Therefore to talk of not seeing the need for the Church is like talking of not seeing the need for the moon. The Church, like the moon, is not a human project, but a divine creation” (Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind, p. 119).
Surprises
“The Christian mind knows that, in any sorting out of the sheep and the goats, of the virtuous from the sinful, the forces of Heaven would slice through human society at an unexpected angle” (Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind, p. 91).
Tissue Thin Armor
“The idea that because a man is learned, especially in subjects appertaining to religion, he is therefore secure from the seductions of worldliness is a fallacy” (Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind, p. 60).
Mine, All Mine
“Of course the very fact that nowadays we look upon convictions as personal possessions is a symptom of the disappearance of the Christian mind” (Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind, p. 40).
Don’t Touch That Remote
“Thou shalt have no prerequisites: Every television program must be a complete package in itself. No previous knowledge is to be required. There must not be even a hint that learning is hierarchical, that it is an edifice constructed on a foundation. The learner must be allowed to enter at any point without prejudice” (Neil …
Infotainment
“Those who run television do not limit our access to information but in fact widen it. Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian. It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; …
Gotta Monger Something
“The executive director of the National Religious Broadcasters Association sums up what he calls an unwritten law of all television preachers: ‘You can get your share of the audience only by offering people something they want’” (Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 105).
Now This
“We have become so accustomed to its discontinuities that we are no longer struck dumb, as any sane person would, by a newscaster who having just reported that a nuclear war is inevitable goes on to say that he will be right back after this word from Burger King; who says, in other words, ‘Now …
How the Media Cuts Our Meat for Us . . . Into Really Tiny Pieces
“The perception of a news show as a stylized dramatic performance whose content has been staged largely to entertain is reinforced by several other features, including the fact that the average length of any story is forty-five seconds” (Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 103).