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“When my feelings rule me, I am intolerant of pain and boredom; I demand that my needs for pleasure and distraction be met as quickly as possible.”
Richard Winter, Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment: Rediscovering Passion and Wonder (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2002), 85.
“The media darlings (celebrities, shows, fashion, etc.) have immense power. Steven Johnson estimates that Charles Dickens sold around 50,000 copies of Bleak House when the population of Great Britain was around 20 million. This amounts to nothing by today’s standards. If Dickens were to impact his country the way a hit TV show (which can garner 10-15 million viewers in a population of 280 million), Dickens would have to sell some 800,000 copies!”
Steven Johnson, Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter (New York: Riverhead, 2005), 134-5.
“First, the item must demonstrate superior quality. Second, it must be truly unique and difficult to acquire. Third, it must enhance one’s status. And fourth, it must brighten one’s self-image, making the buyer feel special.”
According to Milton Pedraza, head of The Luxury Institute, a consultant group that tracks habits of the wealthiest 10% in America, a luxury product has “four pillars.” To me, it seems like these ‘pillars’ are best found in God; Rosemarie Ward, “The Four Facets of Chic,” pp. 13-14, Intelligent Life: New Trends for Smart Living (Summer 2005), 14.
“We are so unhappy that we can only enjoy something which we should be annoyed to see go wrong, and that can and does constantly happen to thousands of things. Anyone who found the secret of rejoicing when things go well without being annoyed when they go badly would have found the point. It is perpetual motion.”
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Translated by Alban J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1995), 181 (Brunschvicg numbering).
“If [people] have been taught that money is the only and best good and that the market is the best test, what are they left with? I wonder about the people who felt that money was the only thing worth having, that the wealth somehow proved you were a hip, evolved, wise person, but now what? Are you not as evolved?”
An interview with Paulina Borsook, author of Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech; Helen Lee, “Silicon Values,” Christianity Today (August 6, 2001).
“Unlike the English, who have never fully embraced the more outré aspects of consumer culture, Americans of all stripes cheer public displays of excess. When our Donalds, or Kimoras, or 50 Cents spend stupid money, they are not merely indulging themselves, they are doing what we would all do if we had that kind of cheddar: sticking it to the Man. In the American context, for all of the Beckhams’ marginal taste in hairstyles, designer brand names, and tattoos, their extravagance is what is now considered ‘class.’”
Michael Hirschorn, “Will America Buy David Beckham?” Details Magazine (March 2007), 215.
“When we call things holy when they are not holy, we commit the sin of idolatry. We give to common things the respect, awe, worship, and adoration that belong only to God. To worship the creature instead of the Creator is the essence of idolatry.”
R. C. Sproul, The Holiness of God (Wheaton: Tyndale House, 1998), 40.
“I always begin from the immediate situation
And then go back as far as I find necessary.
You see, your memories of childhood -
I mean, in your present state of mind -
Would be largely fictitious; and as for your dreams,
You would produce amazing dreams, to oblige me.
I could make you dream any kind of dream I suggested,
And it would only go to flatter your vanity
With the temporary stimulus of feeling interesting.”
Henry, examining Edward; T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950), 2.1, p. 111.
“. . . the mood of the Western world from roughly the 1780s through to the 1980s was very different. We will pipe you (said the prevailing philosophy) the water you need; we will arrange for ‘religion’ to become a small subdepartment of ordinary life; it will be quite safe – harmless, in fact – with church life carefully separated off from everything else in the world, whether politics, art, sex, economics, or whatever. Those who want it can have enough to keep them going. Those who don’t want their life, and their way of life, disrupted by anything ‘religious’ can enjoy driving along concrete roads, visiting concrete-based shopping malls, living in concrete-floored houses. Live as if the rumor of God never existed!”
N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense (Harper One: New York, 2006), 18-19.
“Much of the grubbiness is clean dirt if only you will leave it in the garden and not keep on sprinkling it over the library table.”
C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: HBJ, 1960), 20.
