True, the artist can, out of his own experience, tell the common man a great deal about the fulfillment of man’s nature in living; but he can produce only the most unsatisfactory kind of reply if he is consistently asked the wrong question. And an incapacity for asking the right question has grown, in our time and country, to the proportions of an endemic disease.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Gleanings Quick Links
The Case for Working With Your Hands: “There probably aren’t many jobs that can be reduced to rule-following and still be done well. But in many jobs there is an attempt to do just this, and the perversity of it may go unnoticed by those who design the work process.”
(Matthew Crawford, The New York Times
• 2009 06 04)
Wanda Sykes, Al Franken and the Politics of Incivility: “So civility has an unavoidably moral component. The proper treatment of others conveys regard and demonstrates self-control. Rudeness sets out to dominate and humiliate. . . . Why does politics seem to numb this rudimentary moral sense?”
(Michael Gerson, The Washington Post
• 2009 05 15)
The Threat of Culture: Senior Fellow William Edgar: “Does the perversion of culture mean that the problem is culture itself? Although there are Christians who defend such a view, it is far off the mark…. It is never enough simply to decry the evils of the world, and then to offer salvation either as a way of warring against culture or as an escape from the world. In his Mars Hill speech, Paul reminds his listeners of the original purpose of history. God is the maker of the world and everything in it. He is to be worshiped as such.”
(Gospel & Culture Project
• 2009 03 25)
The New Humanism: Senior Fellow Roger Scruton: “The new humanism spends little time exalting man as an ideal. It says nothing, or next to nothing, about faith, hope, and charity; is scathing about patriotism; and is dismissive of those rearguard actions in defense of the family, public spirit, and sexual restraint that animated my parents. Instead of idealizing man, the new humanism denigrates God and attacks the belief in God as a human weakness. My parents too thought belief in God to be a weakness. But they were reluctant to deprive other human beings of a moral prop that they seemed to need.”
(The American Spectator
• 2009 03 25)
• Knowing and finding (2009 03 20)
• Obama’s Prayer Warriors (2009 03 18)
• How Science Fiction Found Religion (2009 03 11)
• Science and the Obama Administration (2009 03 05)
• The Triumph of Banality (2009 03 04)
more . . .
