A Life in Hell

There never was a time when it was more important for the health and well-being of humankind that men and women should start to make real things with their own hands again. For a human being to spend a life of pressing buttons, or doing boring and non-creative “jobs” in a factory, is to spend a life in hell.

John Seymour

The Hazard of Specialization

The first, and best known, hazard of the specialist system is that it produces specialists—people who are elaborately and expensively trained to do one thing. We get into absurdity very quickly here. There are, for instance, educators who have nothing to teach, communicators who have nothing to say, medical doctors skilled at expensive cures for diseases that they have no skill, and no interest, in preventing. More common, and more damaging, are the inventors, manufacturers, and salesmen of devices who have no concern for the possible effects of those devices. Specialization is thus seen to be a way of institutionalizing, justifying, and paying highly for a calamitous disintegration and scattering-out of the various functions of character: workmanship, care, conscience, responsibility.

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

And now a word from Tevye

Every one of us is a fiddler on the roof, trying to scratch out a pleasant simple tune without breaking his neck.

Tevye the Dairyman

“Why I Walked Out of Church”

By Julie Neidlinger of LonePrairie.net.

Sayers on Christianity

It would not perhaps be altogether surprising if, in this nominally Christian country, where the Creeds are daily recited, there were a number of people who knew all about Christian doctrine and disliked it. It is more startling to discover how many people there are who heartily dislike and despise Christianity without having the faintest notion of what it is.

Dorothy Sayers

Disposable Masterpieces

CBS provides television as Gillette supplies disposable razors— and, alas, the universities turn out degree-holders equally disposable; and the major publishers of New York City (most of them less profitable annexes of conglomerates peddling soap, beer, and paper towels) provide disposable masterpieces.

Donald Hall

Cynical Toward Cynicism

It’s healthy and often profitable to take a cynical view of cynicism itself, at its resolute determination to find sullied motives and conventional behavior.

A.G. Harmon

Comedy Taken Seriously

But great comedy, the comedy of Shakespeare or Sterne, not only can be, but must be, taken seriously. There is nothing to which a man must give himself up with more faith and self-abandonment than to genuine laughter.

G.K. Chesterton

A little nonsense…

A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.

Roald Dahl

D.A. Carson on the Internet – part 2

Scarcely less important than speed of access is the Internet’s sheer intoxicating addictiveness—or, more broadly, we might be better to think of the intoxicating addictiveness of the entire digital world. Many are those who are never quiet, alone, and reflective, who never read material that demands reflection and imagination. The iPods provide the music, the phones constant access to friends, phones and computers tie us to news, video, YouTube, Facebook, and on and on. This is not to demonize tools that are so very useful. Rather, it is to point out the obvious: information does not necessarily spell knowledge, and knowledge does not necessarily spell wisdom, and the incessant demand for unending sensory input from the digital world (says he, as he writes this on a computer for an electronic theological journal) does not guarantee we make good choices. We have the potential to become world citizens, informed about every corner of the globe, but in many western countries the standards of geographical and cross-cultural awareness have seriously declined. We have access to spectacularly useful information, but most of us diddle around on ephemeral blogs and listen to music as enduring as a snowball in a blast furnace. Sometimes we just become burned out by the endless waves of bad news, and decide the best course is to turn the iPod volume up a bit.

D.A. Carson