Cunning as Serpents?: December 2008

30 December 2008

Still culturing...

School is on break, but I for one am still writing papers. Still that doesn't mean this blog has been inactive. Take a look at the interesting conversation going on in the comments section of the previous post.

Topics include:

Do institutions or networks have more influence on culture today? What is the role of cultural elites, and should we try to be one of them?

Does a sociology of philosophies work the same for a sociology of culture in general?

How does grace work in the making/changing of culture? What should those who believe in grace do differently?

What is the role of a strategy in culture making/changing? What does the possibility of grace mean for strategizing?

Quotations

"The best way of telling the difference between those two opposites—righteousness and self-righteousness—is that righteousness has a sense of humour. Self righteousness never does."

--Chief Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks

"He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God."

--Aeschylus

"In the long run, the public interest depends on private virtue."

--James Q. Wilson

"Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. . . . Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art of pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way."

--John Stuart Mill

"Greed is the logical result of the belief that there is no life after death. We grab what we can while we can however we can and then hold on to it hard."

--Sir Fred Catherwood

"... the ache of the artist to find some sense and some story in the beautiful things he sees ... He feels that nothing is perfect unless it is personal. Without that the blind unconscious beauty of the world stands in its garden like a headless statue."

--G.K. Chesterton

"Religious faith is always personal, but it’s never private. It always has social consequences, or it isn’t real"

--Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

"All beauty in the world is either a memory of Paradise or a prophecy of the transfigured world."

--Nicholas Berdyaev

"I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it."

--Marshall McLuhan

"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me."

--Isaac Newton

Cunning as Serpents?

30 December 2008

Still culturing...

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