Culture Is The Widening Quotes

The five marks of the Roman decaying culture: Concern with displaying affluence instead of building wealth; Obsession with sex and perversions of sex; Art becomes freakish and sensationalistic instead of creative and original; Widening disparity between very rich and very poor; Increased demand to live off the state.

Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit.

Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences progress in even greater extent and depth, and the human mind widen itself as much as it desires: beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity, as it shines forth in the Gospels, it will not go.

Sunset's Passions," he read, and opened the book to a random page to read aloud. "'His hands gently caressed her ivory, silky br- " His eyes widened. "By the Wyrd! Do you actually read this rubbish? What happened to Symbols of Power and Eyllwe Customs and Culture?" ... "You may borrow it when I'm done. If you read it, your literary experience will be complete. And," she added with a coy smile, "it will give you some creative ideas of things to do with your lady friends.

For life today in America is based on the premise of ever-widening circles of contact and communication. It involves not only family demands, but community demands, national demands, international demands on the good citizen, through social and cultural pressures, through newspapers, magazines, radio programs, political drives, charitable appeals, and so on. My mind reels in it, What a circus act we women perform every day of our lives. It puts the trapeze artist to shame. Look at us. We run a tight rope daily, balancing a pile of books on the head. Baby-carriage, parasol, kitchen chair, still under control. Steady now!

Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it.

Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit

The world became more aware that America-despite being the hope of many who have the personal drive and ambition to become part of the "American dream"-is beset by serious operational challenges: a massive and growing national debt, widening social inequality, a cornucopian culture that worships materialism, a financial system given to greedy speculation, and a polarized political system

What we are confronted with now is the problem posed by the economic and symbolic structure of television. 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; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment. In America, we are never denied the opportunity to entertain ourselves.

I’m fifteen and I feel like girl my age are under a lot of pressure that boys are not under. I know I am smart, I know I am kind and funny, and I know that everyone around me keeps telling me that I can be whatever I want to be. I know all this but I just don’t feel that way. I always feel like if I don’t look a certain way, if boys don’t think I’m ‘sexy’ or ‘hot’ then I’ve failed and it doesn’t even matter if I am a doctor or writer, I’ll still feel like nothing. I hate that I feel like that because it makes me seem shallow, but I know all of my friends feel like that, and even my little sister. I feel like successful women are only considered a success if they are successful AND hot, and I worry constantly that I won’t be. What if my boobs don’t grow, what if I don’t have the perfect body, what if my hips don’t widen and give me a little waist, if none of that happens I feel like what’s the point of doing anything because I’ll just be the ‘fat ugly girl’ regardless of whether I do become a doctor or not. I wish people would think about what pressure they are putting on everyone, not just teenage girls, but even older people – I watch my mum tear herself apart every day because her boobs are sagging and her skin is wrinkling, she feels like she is ugly even though she is amazing, but then I feel like I can’t judge because I do the same to myself. I wish the people who had real power and control the images and messages we get fed all day actually thought about what they did for once. I know the girls on page 3 are probably starving themselves. I know the girls in adverts are airbrushed. I know beauty is on the inside. But I still feel like I’m not good enough.

Dorian looked down at the book. "This isn't one of the books that I sent you! I don't even own books like these!" She laughed weakly and took the tea from the servant as she approached. "Of course you don't, Dorian. I had the maids send for a copy today." "Sunset's Passions," he read, and opened the book to a random page to read aloud. "'His hands gently caressed her ivory, silky br-'" His eyes widened. "By the Wyrd! Do you actually read this rubbish? What happened to Symbols and Power and Eyllwe Customs and Culture?" She finished her drink, the ginger tea easing her stomach. "You may borrow it when I'm done. If you read it, you literary experience will be complete. And," she added with a coy smile, "it will give you some creative ideas of things to do with your lady friends." He hissed through his teeth. "I will not read this." She took the book from his hands, leaning back. "Then I suppose you're just like Chaol." "Chaol?" he asked, falling into the trap. "You asked Chaol to read this?" "He refused, of course," she lied. "He said it wasn't right for him to read this sort of material if I gave it to him." Dorian snatched the book from her hands. "Give me that, you demon-woman. I'll not have you matching us against each other." He glanced once more at the novel, then turned it over, concealing the title. She smiled, and resumed watching the falling snow.

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire said that the following five attributes marked Rome at its end: first, a mounting love of show and luxury (that is, affluence); second, a widening gap between the very rich and the very poor (this could be among countries in the family of nations as well as in a single nation); third, an obsession with sex; fourth, freakishness in the arts, masquerading as originality, and enthusiasms pretending to be creativity; fifth, an increased desire to live off the state. It all sounds so familiar. We have come a long road since our first chapter, and we are back in Rome.

most cherished desires of present-day Westerners are shaped by romantic, nationalist, capitalist and humanist myths that have been around for centuries. Friends giving advice often tell each other, ‘Follow your heart.’ But the heart is a double agent that usually takes its instructions from the dominant myths of the day, and the very recommendation to ‘follow your heart’ was implanted in our minds by a combination of nineteenth-century Romantic myths and twentieth-century consumerist myths. The Coca-Cola Company, for example, has marketed Diet Coke around the world under the slogan ‘Diet Coke. Do what feels good.’ Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order. Let’s consider, for example, the popular desire to take a holiday abroad. There is nothing natural or obvious about this. A chimpanzee alpha male would never think of using his power in order to go on holiday into the territory of a neighbouring chimpanzee band. The elite of ancient Egypt spent their fortunes building pyramids and having their corpses mummified, but none of them thought of going shopping in Babylon or taking a skiing holiday in Phoenicia. People today spend a great deal of money on holidays abroad because they are true believers in the myths of romantic consumerism. Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can. We must open ourselves to a wide spectrum of emotions; we must sample various kinds of relationships; we must try different cuisines; we must learn to appreciate different styles of music. One of the best ways to do all that is to break free from our daily routine, leave behind our familiar setting, and go travelling in distant lands, where we can ‘experience’ the culture, the smells, the tastes and the norms of other people. We hear again and again the romantic myths about ‘how a new experience opened my eyes and changed my life’. Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right, then we probably need to buy a product (a car, new clothes, organic food) or a service (housekeeping, relationship therapy, yoga classes). Every television commercial is another little legend about how consuming some product or service will make life better. 18. The Great Pyramid of Giza. The kind of thing rich people in ancient Egypt did with their money. Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism. Their marriage has given birth to the infinite ‘market of experiences’, on which the modern tourism industry is founded. The tourism industry does not sell flight tickets and hotel bedrooms. It sells experiences. Paris is not a city, nor India a country – they are both experiences, the consumption of which is supposed to widen our horizons, fulfil our human potential, and make us happier. Consequently, when the relationship between a millionaire and his wife is going through a rocky patch, he takes her on an expensive trip to Paris. The trip is not a reflection of some independent desire, but rather of an ardent belief in the myths of romantic consumerism. A wealthy man in ancient Egypt would never have dreamed of solving a relationship crisis by taking his wife on holiday to Babylon. Instead, he might have built for her the sumptuous tomb she had always wanted. Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids. Only the names, shapes and sizes of these pyramids change from one culture to the other. They may take the form, for example, of a suburban cottage with a swimming pool and an evergreen lawn, or a gleaming penthouse with an enviable view. Few question the myths that cause us to desire the pyramid in the first place.

Firstly, we must widen our common literary world to include many more voices from beyond our comfort zones of the elite first-world cultures.

The contemplation of revealed truth is a disturbing element in Christian philosophy though a very beautiful one, for it means that the framework of philosophy is widened, and, above all, it can never rest satisfied with the flat, one-dimensional "harmonies" of rationalism. That is the moment when a Christian philosophy, striking upon the rock of divine truth, foams and boils; and that is its unique privilege.

what we call cultural evolution is essentially a constant growing and widening of the human imagination.

Every aspect of the multipronged legal system even today is dominated by males: police, prosecutors, judges, probation officers. In addition, the state legislatures that make the laws are still disproportionately male. So how does the abuser come to the far-fetched conclusion that women are somehow lurking in the shadows, pulling strings to cause him to suffer consequences for his actions when he thinks there shouldn’t be any? This absurd leap occurs for two reasons. One is that he already has wellentrenched habits of blaming women for his own behavior. So when society sends him the message that he is responsible for what he does, he just widens the scope of his blame-projecting machine to target all women. The second is that if he didn’t blame women, he would have to accept the fact that a large proportion of men are opposed to what he is doing. Cultural values are changing, slowly but surely, and abusers cannot always count on other men to back them up anymore—a fact that makes them feel betrayed so they close their eyes to it.

Lance is the inevitable product of our celebrity-worshipping culture and the whole money-mad world of sports gone amok. This is the Golden Age of fraud, an era of general willingness to ignore and justify the wrongdoings of the rich and powerful, which makes every lie bigger and widens its destructive path.

Considering the timespan of human evolution and the vast potential of humankind -- as evidenced by great genius and leadership, inventions and discoveries, works of art and literature -- it is lamentable that the economic and political systems of 'advanced' cultures are still based on the unenlightened rationales that 'more is better' and 'might makes right.' In the name of 'survival of the fittest' and ensuring 'vital interests,' our economic system creates an ever-widening gap between rich and poor as it dismantles the environment upon which we all depend. Even 'lower' animals generally do not foul their own nests.

Nowadays, the tendency to be preoccupied with having, at the expense of losing touch with the dimension of being, is becoming ever more pronounced. In times such as ours, when secular and material values dominate social and cultural life to an extreme degree, the intensity of the urge to have creates an ever widening gulf from the awareness of who and what we are.

It's about cultures; they widen the dimensions of the present, they vanquish the walls of the narrow perception. They make you look forward to experiencing a new life that is full of unusual things.

The sense of separateness that our culture foists on us is, in Einstein’s words, ‘a kind of optical delusion of consciousness … a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us’. This delusion of consciousness is not, however, our only available option. ‘Our task,’ he continues, ‘must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Without understanding the truth of racial injustice, both majority-culture and non-White-culture Christians will find themselves mired in dissonant relationships. If we avoid hard truths to preserve personal comfort or to fashion a facade of peace, our division will only widen.

There was some kind of cultural cause for the decline of the ancient world. It was neither corruption of public spirit nor Christianity. It was due to the rise of the logocentric culture rooted in written text. This engendered, in general, a conservative, backward-looking frame of mind, hostile to critical military and technological innovation. It widened the gap between the highly literate elite and the still-illiterate masses. It aroused social strains that the imperial government would not, or perhaps could not, confront. Once the Visigoths had won a lucky battle or two, a general pessimism, docility, and privatism settled in. "The ancients had a phrase for this. They said the world was 'growing old.' It was a mature culture. The Roman in late antiquity needed social and intellectual restoration, not more intensive cultivation of the classical heritage.

I tried to map the cultural trends leading up to it but as I did they grew, interconnecting and weaving backwards and sideways out to everything. Next to the megalithic institutionalized shredding of people's humanity, marked by tombstone malls and scabby hills, the Styrofoam gullets and flag-waving god-chatterers casting their votes for eternal paternity on the lap rapists - next to all of that, the intimacy between a terrorist and his target was almost a beautiful thing but I still couldn't solve that moment when they did it anyway so I grabbed more paper and widened my field of vision.

But in the years to come, as Muslim prestige and learning sank, and Hindu confidence, wealth, education and power increased, Hindus and Muslims would grow gradually apart, as British policies of divide and rule found willing collaborators among the chauvinists of both faiths. The rip in the closely woven fabric of Delhi’s composite culture, opened in 1857, slowly widened into a great gash, and at Partition in 1947 finally broke in two. As the Indian Muslim elite emigrated en masse to Pakistan, the time would soon come when it would be almost impossible to imagine that Hindu sepoys could ever have rallied to the Red Fort and the standard of a Muslim emperor, joining with their Muslim brothers in an attempt to revive the Mughal Empire.

How old is she now?” “Oh, she’s twenty now.” She hesitated. She was obligated to end our little chat with a stylized flourish. The way it’s done in serial television. So she wet her little bunny mouth, sleepied her eyes, widened her nostrils, patted her hair, arched her back, stood canted and hip-shot, huskied her voice and said, “See you aroun’, huh?” “Sure, Marianne. Sure.” Bless them all, the forlorn little rabbits. They are the displaced persons of our emotional culture. They are ravenous for romance, yet settle for what they call making out. Their futile, acne-pitted men drift out of high school into a world so surfeited with unskilled labor there is competition for bag-boy jobs in the supermarkets. They yearn for security, but all they can have is what they make for themselves, chittering little flocks of them in the restaurants and stores, talking of style and adornment, dreaming of the terribly sincere stranger who will come along and lift them out of the gypsy life of the two-bit tip and the unemployment, cut a tall cake with them, swell them up with sassy babies, and guide them masterfully into the shoal water of the electrified house where everybody brushes after every meal. But most of the wistful rabbits marry their unskilled men, and keep right on working. And discover the end of the dream. They have been taught that if you are sunny, cheery, sincere, group-adjusted, popular, the world is yours, including barbecue pits, charge plates, diaper service, percale sheets, friends for dinner, washer-dryer combinations, color slides of the kiddies on the home projector, and eternal whimsical romance—with crinkly smiles and Rock Hudson dialogue. So they all come smiling and confident and unskilled into a technician’s world, and in a few years they learn that it is all going to be grinding and brutal and hateful and precarious. These are the slums of the heart. Bless the bunnies. These are the new people, and we are making no place for them. We hold the dream in front of them like a carrot, and finally say sorry you can’t have any. And the schools where we teach them non-survival are gloriously architectured. They will never live in places so fine, unless they contract something incurable.

Bring Cecily home,” he said curtly. “I won’t have her at risk, even in the slightest way.” “I’ll take care of Cecily,” came the terse reply. “She’s better off without you in her life.” Tate’s eyes widened. “I beg your pardon?” he asked, affronted. “You know what I mean,” Holden said. “Let her heal. She’s too young to consign herself to spinsterhood over a man who doesn’t even see her.” “Infatuation dies,” Tate said. Holden nodded. “Yes, it does. Goodbye.” “So does hero worship,” he continued, laboring the point. “And that’s why after eight years, Cecily has had one raging affair after the other,” he said facetiously. The words had power. They wounded. “You fool,” Holden said in a soft tone. “Do you really think she’d let any man touch her except you?” He went to his office door and gestured toward the desk. “Don’t forget your gadget,” he added quietly. “Wait!” Holden paused with his hand on the doorknob and turned. “What?” Tate held the device in his hands, watching the lights flicker on it. “Mixing two cultures when one of them is all but extinct is a selfish thing,” he said after a minute. “It has nothing to do with personal feelings. It’s a matter of necessity.” Holden let go of the doorknob and moved to stand directly in front of Tate. “If I had a son,” he said, almost choking on the word, “I’d tell him that there are things even more important than lofty principles. I’d tell him…that love is a rare and precious thing, and that substitutes are notoriously unfulfilling.” Tate searched the older man’s eyes. “You’re a fine one to talk.” Holden’s face fell. “Yes, that’s true.” He turned away. Why should he feel guilty? But he did. “I didn’t mean to say that,” Tate said, irritated by his remorse and the other man’s defeated posture. “I can’t help the way I feel about my culture.” “If it weren’t for the cultural difference, how would you feel about Cecily?” Tate hesitated. “It wouldn’t change anything. She’s been my responsibility. I’ve taken care of her. It would be gratitude on her part, even a little hero worship, nothing more. I couldn’t take advantage of that. Besides, she’s involved with Colby.” “And you couldn’t live with being the second man.” Tate’s face hardened. His eyes flashed. Holden shook his head. “You’re just brimming over with excuses, aren’t you? It isn’t the race thing, it isn’t the culture thing, it isn’t even the guardian-ward thing. You’re afraid.” Tate’s mouth made a thin line. He didn’t reply. “When you love someone, you give up control of yourself,” he continued quietly. “You have to consider the other person’s needs, wants, fears. What you do affects the other person. There’s a certain loss of freedom as well.” He moved a step closer. “The point I’m making is that Cecily already fills that place in your life. You’re still protecting her, and it doesn’t matter that there’s another man. Because you can’t stop looking out for her. Everything you said in this office proves that.” He searched Tate’s turbulent eyes. “You don’t like Colby Lane, and it isn’t because you think Cecily’s involved with him. It’s because he’s been tied to one woman so tight that he can’t struggle free of his love for her, even after years of divorce. That’s how you feel, isn’t it, Tate? You can’t get free of Cecily, either. But Colby’s always around and she indulges him. She might marry him in an act of desperation. And then what will you do? Will your noble excuses matter a damn then?

And that discovery would betray the closely guarded secret of modern culture to the laughter of the world. For we moderns have nothing of our own. We only become worth notice by filling ourselves to overflowing with foreign customs, arts, philosophies, religions and sciences: we are wandering encyclopaedias, as an ancient Greek who had strayed into our time would probably call us. But the only value of an encyclopaedia lies in the inside, in the contents, not in what is written outside, in the binding or the wrapper. And so the whole of modern culture is essentially internal; the bookbinder prints something like this on the cover: “Manual of internal culture for external barbarians.” The opposition of inner and outer makes the outer side still more barbarous, as it would naturally be, when the outward growth of a rude people merely developed its primitive inner needs. For what means has nature of repressing too great a luxuriance from without? Only one,—to be affected by it as little as possible, to set it aside and stamp it out at the first opportunity. And so we have the custom of no longer taking real things seriously, we get the feeble personality on which the real and the permanent make so little impression. Men become at last more careless and accommodating in external matters, and the [Pg 34] considerable cleft between substance and form is widened; until they have no longer any feeling for barbarism, if only their memories be kept continually titillated, and there flow a constant stream of new things to be known, that can be neatly packed up in the cupboards of their memory.

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; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment. In America, we are never denied the opportunity to amuse ourselves.

The cultural barrier between the Christian and the Muslim world still irritates the approach of Americans to the whole issue considerably; Americans tend to widen the circle of involvement to catch the largest possible numbers of Muslims. They always speak about the Big Conspiracy against the U.S. I personally had been interrogated about people who just practiced the basics of the religion and sympathized with Islamic movements; I was asked to provide every detail about Islamic movements, no matter how moderate. That’s amazing in a country like the U.S., where Christian terrorist organizations such as Nazis and White Supremacists have the freedom to express themselves and recruit people openly and nobody can bother them. But as a Muslim, if you sympathize with the political views of an Islamic organization you’re in big trouble. Even attending the same mosque as a suspect is big trouble. I mean this fact is clear for everybody who understands the ABCs of American policy toward so-called Islamic Terrorism.

Without the pathos of distance, the sort which grows out of the deeply rooted difference between the social classes, out of the constant gazing outward and downward of the ruling caste on the subjects and work implements, and out of their equally sustained practice of obedience and command, holding down and holding at a distance, that other more mysterious pathos would have no chance of growing at all, that longing for an ever new widening of distances inside the soul itself, the development of ever higher, rarer, more distant, more expansive, more comprehensive states, in short, simply the enhancement in the type 'man,' the constant 'self-conquest of man,' to cite a moral formula in a supra-moral sense. Of course, where the history of the origins of aristocratic society is concerned (and thus the precondition for that raising of the type 'man' —), We should not surrender to humanitarian illusions: truth is hard. So without further consideration, let's admit to ourselves how up to this point every higher culture on earth has started! People with a still natural nature, barbarians in every dreadful sense of the word, predatory men still in possession of an unbroken power of the will and a desire for power, threw themselves on weaker, more civilized, more peaceful, perhaps trading or cattle-raising races, or on old, worn cultures, in which at that very moment the final forces of life were flaring up in a dazzling fireworks display of spirit and corruption. At the start the noble caste has always been the barbarian caste: its superiority has lain not primarily in physical might but in psychical power — it has been a matter of more COMPLETE human beings (which at every level also means 'more complete beasts').

The propositions that accompany most of the chapters . . . are not as snappy as I would prefer—but there’s a reason for their caution and caveats. On certain important points, the clamor of genuine scientific dispute has abated and we don’t have to argue about them anymore. But to meet that claim requires me to state the propositions precisely. I am prepared to defend all of them as “things we don’t have to argue about anymore”—but exactly as I worded them, not as others may paraphrase them. Here they are: 1. Sex differences in personality are consistent worldwide and tend to widen in more gender-egalitarian cultures. 2. On average, females worldwide have advantages in verbal ability and social cognition while males have advantages in visuospatial abilities and the extremes of mathematical ability. 3. On average, women worldwide are more attracted to vocations centered on people and men to vocations centered on things. 4. Many sex differences in the brain are coordinate with sex differences in personality, abilities, and social behavior. 5. Human populations are genetically distinctive in ways that correspond to self-identified race and ethnicity. 6. Evolutionary selection pressure since humans left Africa has been extensive and mostly local. 7. Continental population differences in variants associated with personality, abilities, and social behavior are common. 8. The shared environment usually plays a minor role in explaining personality, abilities, and social behavior. 9. Class structure is importantly based on differences in abilities that have a substantial genetic component. 10. Outside interventions are inherently constrained in the effects they can have on personality, abilities, and social behavior.

He plucked another glass from a passing tray. “Unlike other cultures, Phrixians aren’t born with their surnames. We earn them. Zemen means ‘strength through adversity.’ Jari is ‘honor in battle.’ ” Ah… She hadn’t caught the different nomenclature earlier because she hadn’t realized when they were introduced that Safir was Maris’s brother. “And Sulle?” He gave her a twisted grin. “ ‘Invincible.’ ” Her eyes widened at that. “I really was a soldier, Zarya,” he said simply. Then he held his hands wide to show her his body. “Underneath all this fashionable, sexy attire is a bitch who knows how to kick ass and smack people around with the best of them.” She

Disparities in economic standing drive radical differences in Americans’ values, causing a pronounced and antagonistic political ideologically. Americans are progressively viewing members of the domestic opposition party as the greatest threat to their wellbeing. Instead of fearing a war overseas, Americans are increasing distrustful of other Americans. A great American cultural war between the rich and poor is inevitable, unless corporate America and its wealthiest citizens voluntary commence accepting a larger load of taxation and the government implements dramatic steps to shore up the disparity that continues to widen between the people on contrasting economic poles.

I want my kids to have their adventure. That's the great joy of life: the adventure, choosing correctly in the face of adversity, overcoming obstacles and thriving. They can only have that adventure if I teach them to defend the individual rights our founders recognized - rights that preexist government, that adhere to them as individual human beings created in the image of God; if I teach them to engage in a culture of robust debate and to act with virtue in that culture; and if I remind them that they are inheritors of a grand and glorious American tradition, and that it is their responsibility to carry forward that tradition while widening its promises to more and more human beings.

These examinations and certificates and so on--what did they matter? And all this efficiency and up-to-dateness--what did that matter, either? Ralston was trying to run Brookfield like a factory--a factory for turning out a snob culture based on money and machines. The old gentlemanly traditions of family and broad acres were changing, as doubtless they were bound to; but instead of widening them to form a genuine inclusive democracy of duke and dustman, Ralston was narrowing them upon the single issue of a fat banking account. There never had been so many rich men's sons at Brookfield. The Speech Day Garden Party was like Ascot. Ralston met these wealthy fellows in London clubs and persuaded them that Brookfield was the coming school, and, since they couldn't buy their way into Eton or Harrow, they greedily swallowed the bait. Awful fellows, some of them--though others were decent enough. Financiers, company promoters, pill manufacturers. One of them gave his son five pounds a week pocket money. Vulgar . . . ostentatious . . . all the hectic rotten-ripeness of the age. . . . And once Chips had got into trouble because of some joke he had made about the name and ancestry of a boy named Isaacstein. The boy wrote home about it, and Isaacstein père sent an angry letter to Ralston. Touchy, no sense of humor, no sense of proportion--that was the matter with them, these new fellows. . . . No sense of proportion. And it was a sense of proportion, above all things, that Brookfield ought to teach--not so much Latin or Greek or Chemistry or Mechanics. And you couldn't expect to test that sense of proportion by setting papers and granting certificates...

One of his favourite gags, which he repeats in the prologue to a number of plays, is some version of ‘Demophilus wrote this, Plautus barbarised it’, referring to his Latin (‘barbaric’) translation of a comedy by the Greek playwright Demophilus. This apparently throwaway line was, in fact, a clever challenge to the audience. For those of Greek origin, it no doubt gave the opportunity for a quiet snigger at the expense of the new, barbaric rulers of the world. For the others, it demanded the conceptual leap of imagining what they might look like from the outside. To enjoy the laugh, they had to understand, even if only as a joke, that to Greek eyes, Romans might appear to be barbarians. The widening horizons of empire, in other words, disturbed the simple hierarchy of ‘us over them’, the ‘civilised over the barbarous’, which had underpinned classical Greek culture.

Finally, the inner accessibility and reflectiveness of theoretical knowledge which cannot basically be withheld from anybody, as can certain emotions and volitions, has a consequence that directly offsets its practical results. In the first place, it is precisely because of their general accessibility that factors quite independent of personal capacities decide on the factual utilization of knowledge. This leads to the enormous preponderance of the most unintelligent 'educated' person over the cleverest proletarian. The apparent equality with which educational materials are available to everyone interested in them is, in reality, a sheer mockery. The same is true of the other freedoms accorded by the liberal doctrines which, though they certainly do not hamper the individual from gaining goods of any kind, do however disregard the fact that only those already privileged in some way or another have the possibility of acquiring them. For just as the substance of education - in spite of, or because of it general availability - can ultimately be acquired only through individual activity, so it gives rise to the most intangible and thus the most unassailable aristocracy, to a distinction between high and low which can be abolished neither (as can socioeconomic differences) by a decree or a revolution. Thus it was appropriate for Jesus to say to the rich youth: 'Give away your goods to the poor', but not for him to say: 'Give your education to the underprivileged'. There is no advantage that appears to those in inferior positions to be so despised, and before which they feel so deprived and helpless, as the advantage of education. For this reason, attempts to achieve practical equality very often and in so many variations scorn intellectual education. This is true of Buddha, the Cynics, certain currents in Christianity, down to Robespierre's 'nous n'avons pas besoin de savants'. In speech and writing - which, viewed abstractly, are a manifestation of its communal nature - makes possible its accumulation, and, especially, its concentration so that, in this respect, the gulf between high and low is persistently widened. The intellectually gifted or the materially independent person will have all the more chances for standing out from the masses the larger and more concentrated are the available educational materials. Just as the proletarian today has many comforts and cultural enjoyments that were formerly denied to him, while at the same time - particularly if we look back over several centuries and millennia - the gulf between his way of life and that of the higher strata has certainly become much deeper, so, similarly, the rise in the general level of knowledge as a whole does not by any means bring about a general levelling, but rather its opposite.

It is evident that wealth is even more unevenly distributed than income and that the gap is widening. Since 1976, wealth has increased by 63 percent for the wealthiest 1 percent of the population and by 71 percent for the top 20 percent. Wealth has decreased by 43 percent for the bottom 40 percent of the U.S. population (Economic Policy Institute 2011). The widening gap has multiple causes. First, shifts in the U.S. tax code have lowered the top tax rate from 91 percent in the years from 1950 to 1963, to 35 percent from 2003 to 2012, allowing the wealthy to retain far more of their income (Tax Policy Center 2012). Second, wages for most U.S. families have stagnated since the early 1970s. Moreover, credit card, education, and mortgage debt have skyrocketed. Finally, the collapse of the housing market beginning in 2007 dramatically affected many middleclass families who held a significant portion of their wealth in the value of their home. By 2012, fully 31 percent of all homeowners owed more on their mortgages than their homes were worth (Zillow 2012).

Another sketch-this one of Gabriel-hung on the all above the water cask. It swiveled gently on a single tack; or rather, the paper hung plump with gravity while the whole ship swiveled around it. She’d captured Gabriel’s toothy, inoffensive grin and the devilish gleam in his eye, and the effect of the paper’s constant, subtle rocking was to make the image come alive. Softly, strangely-the portrait of Gabriel was laughing. Gray shook himself. Laughing at him, most likely. “She comes here?” he asked. “Aye. That she does. Every morning.” Gabriel straightened his hunched spine and adopted a cultured tone. “We take tea.” Gray frowned. One more place he’d have to avoid-the galley at morning teatime. “See to it that she eats something. Slip more milk in her tea. Make her treacle duff every day, if she cares for it. Are you giving her a daily ration of lime juice?” Gabriel smiled down at the salt pork. “Yes, sir.” “Double it.” “Yes, sir.” Gabriel’s grin widened. “And stop grinning, damn it.” “Yes, sir.” The old man practically sang the words as he pounded away at the meat. “Never thought I’d live to see the day.

My Nobel appeal: it’s hard to put the whole world to rights, but let us at least think about how we can prepare our own small corner of it, this corner of literature where we read, write, publish, recommend, denounce, and give awards to books. If we are to play an important role in this uncertain future, if we are to get the best from the writers of today and tomorrow, I believe we must become more diverse. I mean this in two particular senses. Firstly, we must widen our common literary world to include many more voices from beyond our comfort zones of the elite first world cultures. We must search more energetically to discover the gems from what remain today unknown literary cultures, whether the writers live in faraway countries or within our own communities. Second, we must take great care not to set too narrowly or conservatively our definitions of what constitutes good literature. The next generation will come with all sorts of new, sometimes bewildering ways to tell important and wonderful stories. We must keep our minds open to them, especially regarding genre and form, so that we can nurture and celebrate the best of them. In a time of dangerously increasing division we must listen. Good writing and good reading will break down barriers. We may even find a new idea, a great humane vision around which to rally.

The attachment voids experienced by immigrant children are profound. The hardworking parents are focused on supporting their families economically and, unfamiliar with the language and customs of their new society, they are not able to orient their children with authority or confidence. Peers are often the only people available for such children to latch on to. Thrust into a peer-oriented culture, immigrant families may quickly disintegrate. The gulf between child and parent can widen to the point that becomes unbridgeable. Parents of these children lose their dignity, their power, and their lead. Peers ultimately replace parents and gangs increasingly replace families. Again, immigration or the necessary relocation of people displaced by war or economic misery is not the problem. Transplanted to peer-driven North American society, traditional cultures succumb. We fail our immigrants because of our own societal failure to preserve the child-parent relationship. In some parts of the country one still sees families, often from Asia, join together in multigenerational groups for outings. Parents, grandparents, and even frail great-grandparents mingle, laugh, and socialize with their children and their children's offspring. Sadly, one sees this only among relatively recent immigrants. As youth become incorporated into North American society, their connections with their elders fade. They distance themselves from their families. Their icons become the artificially created and hypersexualized figures mass-marketed by Hollywood and the U.S. music industry. They rapidly become alienated from the cultures that have sustained their ancestors for generation after generation. As we observe the rapid dissolution of immigrant families under the influence of the peer-oriented society, we witness, as if on fast-forward video, the cultural meltdown we ourselves have suffered in the past half century. It would be encouraging to believe that other parts of the world will successfully resist the trend toward peer orientation. The opposite is likely to be the case as the global economy exerts its corrosive influences on traditional cultures on other continents. Problems of teenage alienation are now widely encountered in countries that have most closely followed upon the American model — Britain, Australia, and Japan. We may predict similar patterns elsewhere to result from economic changes and massive population shifts. For example, stress-related disorders are proliferating among Russian children. According to a report in the New York Times, since the collapse of the Soviet Union a little over a decade ago, nearly a third of Russia's estimated 143 million people — about 45 million — have changed residences. Peer orientation threatens to become one of the least welcome of all American cultural exports.

out of their equally sustained practice of obedience and command, holding down and holding at a distance, that other more mysterious pathos would have no chance of growing at all, that longing for an ever new widening of distances inside the soul itself, the development of ever higher, rarer, more distant, more expansive, more comprehensive states, in short, simply the enhancement in the type 'man,' the constant 'self-conquest of man,' to cite a moral formula in a supra-moral sense. Of course, where the history of the origins of aristocratic society is concerned (and thus the precondition for that raising of the type 'man' —), we should not surrender to humanitarian illusions: truth is hard. So without further consideration, let's admit to ourselves how up to this point every higher culture on earth has started! People with a still natural nature, barbarians in every dreadful sense of the word, predatory men still in possession of an unbroken power of the will and a desire for power, threw themselves on weaker, more civilized, more peaceful, perhaps trading or cattle-raising races, or on old, worn cultures, in which at that very moment the final forces of life were flaring up in a dazzling fireworks display of spirit and corruption. At the start the noble caste has always been the barbarian caste: its superiority has lain not primarily in physical might but in psychical power — it has been a matter of more COMPLETE human beings (which at every level also means 'more complete beasts').

No sound strategy for studying fascism can fail to examine the entire context in which it was formed and grew. Some approaches to fascism start with the crisis to which fascism was a response, at the risk of making the crisis into a cause. A crisis of capitalism, according to Marxists, gave birth to fascism. Unable to assure ever-expanding markets, ever-widening access to raw materials, and ever-willing cheap labor through the normal operation of constitutional regimes and free markets, capitalists were obliged, Marxists say, to find some new way to attain these ends by force. Others perceive the founding crisis as the inadequacy of liberal state and society (in the laissez-faire meaning of liberalism current at that time) to deal with the challenges of the post-1914 world. Wars and revolutions produced problems that parliament and the market—the main liberal solutions—appeared incapable of handling: the distortions of wartime command economies and the mass unemployment attendant upon demobilization; runaway inflation; increased social tensions and a rush toward social revolution; extension of the vote to masses of poorly educated citizens with no experience of civic responsibility; passions heightened by wartime propaganda; distortions of international trade and exchange by war debts and currency fluctuations. Fascism came forward with new solutions for these challenges. Fascists hated liberals as much as they hated socialists, but for different reasons. For fascists, the internationalist, socialist Left was the enemy and the liberals were the enemies’ accomplices. With their hands-off government, their trust in open discussion, their weak hold over mass opinion, and their reluctance to use force, liberals were, in fascist eyes, culpably incompetent guardians of the nation against the class warfare waged by the socialists. As for beleaguered middle-class liberals themselves, fearful of a rising Left, lacking the secret of mass appeal, facing the unpalatable choices offered them by the twentieth century, they have sometimes been as ready as conservatives to cooperate with fascists. Every strategy for understanding fascism must come to terms with the wide diversity of its national cases. The major question here is whether fascisms are more disparate than the other “isms.” This book takes the position that they are, because they reject any universal value other than the success of chosen peoples in a Darwinian struggle for primacy. The community comes before humankind in fascist values, and respecting individual rights or due process gave way to serving the destiny of the Volk or razza. Therefore each individual national fascist movement gives full expression to its own cultural particularism. Fascism, unlike the other “isms,” is not for export: each movement jealously guards its own recipe for national revival, and fascist leaders seem to feel little or no kinship with their foreign cousins. It has proved impossible to make any fascist “international” work.

He looks me up and down and I can tell he isn’t impressed. I smile at his reaction. “Who are you to trespass in my territory and kill one of my men?” His voice sounds cultured, like he went to some expensive college. Do they have those in Aether, I wonder idly as I step closer. “Rothgrun, isn’t it?” Like I’m not sure. “It is.” I nod. “Yeah, well, I’m the guy who’s going to kill you and your men if you don’t get out of my way.” Treflynn clears his throat behind me; Rothgrun’s eyes widen. I flick a glance down at myself; the glyphs reappear all over my body with a rush of power. “What manner of beast are you?” Rothgrun murmurs. “Right now, one that’s in a hurry.” I step over the finally dead Von and the bully backs up. “I really don’t have time for this. There’s a girl out there who needs my help and I have to get to her.” His eyes search mine. “The Protector. We have heard about you. You may pass.” I motion the others forward and he stops me. “Just you.” I chuckle, then take another step toward him. “No. All of us pass, or all of you die.” “I do not believe you can kill all of us before we kill you.” I flex my fists and let a little of that old demon charm leak into my expression. “You willing to find out? Cause I am. And I’ll start with you.

Alas, this brings us to a closer understanding of critical theory. What is often termed (for better or worse) “cultural Marxism,” or Marxism operating on the cultural front, is more often or formally referred to in the academy as “critical theory.”629 Today, in the twenty-first century, much of the more culturally inclined Marxism flies under that banner. There are entire academic departments at universities dedicated to critical theory. Tellingly, most of these academic proponents of Marxism are not economics or political science professors, or historians, most of whom know better, but faculty from English departments. Only in our intellectually bankrupt universities could these vapid viewpoints get a following let alone a hearing. There seems to be an ever-widening panoply of these Marxists. The numbers evolve as the Marxism itself evolves. Today, there are even gender Marxists in the academy. There are, for instance, self-described “queer theorists” and academicians engaged in “intersectionality” who are Marxists focused on cultural work. Above all, these Marxists are about culture. Culture, culture, culture.

Much to the slaveholders' delight, the degradation of slave life increased the social distance between plantation slaves and urban free people of color. Nothing seemed to be further from the cosmopolitan world of New Orleans and the other Gulf ports than the narrow alternatives of the plantation, with its isolation, machine-like regimentation, and harsh discipline. As free people of color strove to establish themselves in the urban marketplace and master the etiquette of a multilingual society, they drew back from the horrors of plantation life and from the men and women forced to live that nightmare. The repulsion may have been mutual. Plantation slaves, many of them newly arrived Africans, little appreciated the intricacies of urban life and had neither the desire nor the ability to meet its complex conventions. Rather than embrace European-American standards, planation slaves sought to escape them. Their cultural practices pointed toward Africa - as did their filed teeth and tribal markings. While free people of color embraced Christianity and identified with the Catholic Church, the trappings of the white man's religions were not to be found in the quarter. Planters, ever eager to divide the black majority, labored to enlarge differences between city-bound free people of color and plantation slaves. Rewarding with freedom those men and women who displayed the physical and cultural attributes of European Americans fit their purpose exactly, as did employing free colored militiamen against maroons or feting white gentlemen and colored ladies at quadroon balls. It was no accident that the privileges afforded to free people of color expanded when the danger of slave rebellion was greatest. Nor was it mysterious that the free colored population grew physically lighter as the slave population - much of it just arrived from Africa - grew darker. But somatic coding was just one means of dividing slave and free blacks. Every time black militiamen took to the field against the maroons or a young white gentlemen took a colored mistress, the distance between slaves and free people of color widened.

They believed in me, paid for my tuition, enabled me to glean the culture that I embraced with great devotion. They taught me principles and values. For this, I will forever be grateful to them. Likewise, I know that they beguiled, manipulated, and broke me into a thousand pieces. They treated me like clay that they could shape as they saw fit. Yet, I bear them no ill will. The outcome has been quite different from what they hoped for—not that it exceeds their expectations; it is just starkly different from what they could have expected. They gave me the tools to create a perfectly unique patchwork, full of all these things—books, culture, experiences—but also of Awaya, sinking deep into the forest to harvest her medicinal herbs. I am the product of the generosity of the reverend sister who first called me 'Anna' and who widened my horizon. I am also the product of the protection of Samgali and my deceased mothers. I am made of movies and music, of the contradictions that ripple through my country, of the political consciousness born of the covert, dirty war that set Bamileke country on fire.

If Leonardo's example of diversification had been more widely followed, the whole tempo of mechanical and scientific development would have been slowed down. This means that the pace of change might have been established in relation to human need, and that valuable parts of man's cultural heritage might have been kept alive, instead of being ruthlessly extirpated in order to widen the empire of the machine. Instead of rapid advances, on the basis of uncoordinated knowledge, in specialized departments, mainly those concerned with war and economic exploitation, there would have been the possibility of a slower but better-coordinated advance that did justice to the processes, functions, and purposes of life.

Long before any richness of culture had been achieved, nature had provided man with its own master model of inexhaustible creativity, whereby randomness gave way to organization, and organization gradually embodied purpose and significance. This creativity is its own reason for existence and its own reward. To widen the sphere of significant creativity and prolong its period of development is man's only answer to his consciousness of his own death.

Here's the thing about history - it repeats itself over and over and over. The witch hunts, and the demonization of contraception and abortion and the women who provided these services from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, are happening all over again. This time, though, the witch hunt is a cynical ploy to distract the populace from some of the truly pressing issues our society is facing: the devastated economy and a Wall Street culture that remains unchecked even after the damage it has done, the raging class inequalities and widening gap between those who have and those who have not, the looming student loan and consumer debt crisis, the fractured racial climate, the lack of civil rights for gay, lesbian, and transgender people, a health care system too many people don't have access to, wars without cease, impending global threats, and on and on and on. Rather than solve the real problems the United States is facing, some politicians, mostly conservative, have decided to try to solve the "female problem" by creating a smoke screen, reintroducing abortion and, more inexplicably, birth control into a national debate.

Sunset’s Passions,” he read, and opened the book to a random page to read aloud. “His hands gently caressed her ivory, silky br—” His eyes widened. “By the Wyrd! Do you actually read this rubbish? What happened to Symbols and Power and Eyllwe Customs and Culture?” She finished her drink, the ginger tea easing her stomach. “You may borrow it when I’m done. If you read it, your literary experience will be complete. And,” she added with a coy smile, “it will give you some creative ideas of things to do with your lady friends.” He hissed through his teeth. “I will not read this.” She took the book from his hands, leaning back. “Then I suppose you’re just like Chaol.” “Chaol?” he asked, falling into the trap. “You asked Chaol to read this?” “He refused, of course,” she lied. “He said it wasn’t right for him to read this sort of material if I gave it to him.” Dorian snatched the book from her hands. “Give me that, you demon-woman. I’ll not have you matching us against each other.” He glanced once more at the novel, then turned it over, concealing the title.

Kazuo Ishiguro was pushing for such an expansion in his 1917 Nobel Lecture. After speaking so movingly about the effect singers have on his writing and discussing a film, amidst his literary musings and remembrances, he ended with a plea that serves well as a conclusion to this Nobel Prize section with its comments on future generations, genre and form: “… we must widen our common literary world to include many more voices from beyond our comfort zones of the elite first world cultures. We must search more energetically to discover the gems from what remain today unknown literary cultures, whether the writers live in far away countries or within our own communities. Second: we must take great care not to set too narrowly or conservatively our definitions of what constitutes good literature. The next generation will come with all sorts of new, sometimes bewildering ways to tell important and wonderful stories. We must keep our minds open to them, especially regarding genre and form, so that we can nurture and celebrate the best of them.

Kazuo Ishiguro was pushing for such an expansion in his 1917 Nobel Lecture. After speaking so movingly about the effect singers have on his writing and discussing a film, amidst his literary musings and remembrances, he ended with a plea that serves well as a conclusion to this Nobel Prize section with its comments on future generations, genre and form: “… we must widen our common literary world to include many more voices from beyond our comfort zones of the elite first world cultures. We must search more energetically to discover the gems from what remain today unknown literary cultures, whether the writers live in far away countries or within our own communities. Second: we must take great care not to set too narrowly or conservatively our definitions of what constitutes good literature. The next generation will come with all sorts of new, sometimes bewildering ways to tell important and wonderful stories. We must keep our minds open to them, especially regarding genre and form, so that we can nurture and celebrate the best of them. In a time of dangerously increasing division, we must listen. Good writing and good reading will break down barriers. We may even find a new idea, a great humane vision, around which to rally.

As we look at the current state of leadership, if we think all these problems have been created by “the other side,” we’re missing the point. If we want a better culture, a better country, and a better world, we need to look in the mirror and recognize our own contributions to the division we’re experiencing. We need to have a change of heart and mind in how we treat people. Instead of widening the chasm between us, we need to build bridges and move toward others while looking for common ground. The way to do that is to become a leader who takes the high road. That is what this book is about.

For four hundred years there had been order and law, respect for property, and a widening culture. All had vanished. The buildings, such as they were, were of wood, not stone. The people had lost entirely the art of writing. Some miserable runic scribblings were the only means by which they could convey their thoughts or wishes to one another at a distance.

Teach skills of healthy interdependence. Instead of raising kids who think they must do it all on their own, teach them how to ask for help when they need it and model these skills yourself. Make chores mandatory. To encourage a “we’re all in this together” mindset, you might save your own household chores—paying the bills, recycling newspapers, straightening up the house—for when your kids are scheduled to do theirs. Avoid linking chores to allowances or excessive praise. Chores are what you do when you are part of a family, a contribution to the greater whole. Widen their circle of concern and caring. Point out how other people add value to your kids’ lives every day, like janitors at school who work hard to keep the school clean of germs, or teachers who sacrifice their own time to meet outside class. Broaden their circle of caring. Say thank you to the waitress and the bus driver. Children learn kindness and empathy not just by how we treat those closest to us, but also by how we treat strangers, notes Rick Weissbourd.

What changed, starting in the late 1970s, was citizen leverage. Financial leverage, grassroots protest leverage, and the leverage of the vote were all systematically targeted for destruction. Income inequality widened to the point that it outpaced that of the Gilded Age, meaning that billionaires hoard more wealth and have more power than ever before.

Summing Up In the midst of polarized and polarizing debates, it is important to ask, not only what a text says, but what it means. This entails determining the moral logic that shapes biblical prohibitions or commands—discerning why a text says what it does and clarifying its underlying values and assumptions. Determining this underlying moral logic is particularly important when interpreting Scripture in cross-cultural contexts. At numerous points in the history of Christian interpretation of Scripture, the church has needed to exercise its imagination to discern a wider and more encompassing form of moral logic underlying biblical commands and prohibitions. This book seeks to accomplish such an exercise with a renewed and widened imagination regarding the moral logic underlying Scripture’s discussion of same-sex intimate relationships.

The way this affected Goldman was that its relatively tight bands for compensation for people at the same level started to widen, and the partners decided that exceptions in hiring, compensating, and promoting “stars” must be made, further impacting Goldman’s culture.

Miss Knight.” She paused, her hand on the doorknob. She didn’t turn to face him, merely waited for him to say whatever was left to say. “I would prefer someone older. Someone less like you.” Now what the hell did that mean? Someone less like her? “You know,” he said lamely when she turned to face him quizzically. To his credit he looked as confused as she felt. “Nope. Don’t have a clue.” Her voice was so icy that her words practically froze as they left her lips. “Someone with more experience. With less personality.” “What?” “You talk too much,” he said pointedly. “Your attitude is too familiar and too sarcastic.” She opened her mouth to say something, and he held up a finger to stop her. “And that was before everything that happened in Tokyo. You’re completely irreverent and have a bizarre sense of humor. I also have no wish to hear about reality television shows, pop music, manicures, Brangelina, Star Trek, or anything that’s trending on Twitter—not even secondhand through whispered telephone conversations when my assistant thinks I’m not paying attention.” Well, he’d certainly been a lot more attentive during those half hours in the mornings than she’d given him credit for. But one thing struck her as odd. “Star Trek?” she repeated. She loved the new movies but hardly ever publicly discussed them. “You’re constantly talking about how sick you are of the Cardassians,” he elaborated uncomfortably. Her eyes widened and she stifled a laugh. “Different kind of Kardashian,” she corrected. It would be hopeless to explain it to a man who clearly had no interest in pop culture—even while every model or actress he was publicly photographed with inserted him into the very scene he was so scornful of. Quite frankly, she was impressed that he even knew about the Cardassians in Star Trek, which attested to a level of geekdom that she would never have suspected of him. “So you’re looking for the anti-me?” “It shouldn’t be so hard to find the complete opposite of you. You are quite . . .” His brow lowered as he tried to find the correct word. “Singular.” “Thank you,” she said, ridiculously flattered until a closer glance at his straight face told her that it hadn’t been a compliment. Her fledgling smile died, and she once again—as she often did in his presence—fought the urge to roll her eyes. “Okay, so you’re looking for an old, boring, and competent assistant,” she itemized, and his lips thinned but he said nothing. “I’ll get on that right away, sir.

For this reason, although our thinking brains tend to consider chronic stress, shock trauma, developmental trauma, and relational trauma to be different things, they all create the same effects in the mind-body system. If they’re so similar in their effects, then why does our culture usually treat them so differently? The short answer is that many powerful and ambitious people have a hard time admitting their mind-body system’s vulnerability. Powerful, high-achieving, and successful people—and the high-status institutions where they work—have no problem acknowledging “stress.” Indeed, we tend to consider “being stressed” to be a badge of honor—the evidence that we’re successful and accomplished. In our collective understanding, “being stressed” means being overworked, overscheduled, extremely busy, and definitely important. It’s just a necessary by-product of being a Master of the Universe. Why else would so many of us boast about how few hours of sleep we got last night? Or how many days have passed since we’ve seen our kids awake by the time we got home from work? Or how many different activities or demands we’re juggling at the same time? Or how many years it’s been since we took a proper vacation—or even a full weekend off? In our culture, we romanticize our stress, even as we whine about it with humble-brags like these.

British physicist, novelist, and science advisor C. P. Snow, a man who straddled many worlds, like the scientist/artist/statesmen of old. In a famous 1959 lecture titled “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” Snow warned that the widening communication gulf between the sciences and the humanities threatened the ability of modern peoples to solve their problems:

New Haven psychologist Lisa Cross believes that it is no coincidence that these body-control syndromes occur more often in women than in men, and that they all tend to have their onset in adolescence. From birth to death, Cross argues, a female's experience of her body is far more confused and discontinuous than a male's: from her partially hidden genitals to the pain and mystery of menstruation to the abrupt and radical changes in body contours and function associated with puberty and childbearing to the symbiotic possession of her body by another life during pregnancy and breast-feeding. As a result, some women see their bodies as fragmented, foreign, unfamiliar, frightening, and out of control—as object, not subject, as Cross puts it. Add in social and cultural pressures—which lead teenage girls to define their bodies by their attractiveness, while boys define theirs by strength and function—and it is easy to understand what a perilous passage puberty can be for young women. In fact, it is puberty that first introduces bleeding and body fat into a girl's life, two very powerful symbols of the loss of control over her body. The psychological chasm between body and self widens when girls must negotiate these challenges in an environment fraught with the pain and terror of physical or sexual abuse or unempathetic parenting. "Self-cutting and eating disorders, as bizarre and self-destructive as they can appear, are nonetheless attempts to own the body, to perceive the body as self (not other), known (not uncharted and unpredictable), and impenetrable (not invaded or controlled from the outside)," Cross theorizes.

The Idaho “wolf wars” offer insight into the political, economic, and cultural boundaries that mark the contemporary Northwest. An examination of them reveals stark divisions that appear to be widening well into the twenty-first century.

Of course, I’m talking about what most people know as “brain freeze.” Scientists identify it as a stimulus headache, or sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia for all you science nerds. You may be surprised to learn that serious studies have been conducted on brain freeze at major institutions such as Harvard University. These studies have shown that brain freeze happens when an extremely cold substance quickly hits the roof of the mouth, causing the capillaries to constrict, followed by an equally quick rewarming when warm air is reintroduced to the mouth. This warming causes vasodilation, or a widening of the blood vessels. The rapid changes in temperature in the upper mouth lead to this painful sensation. Most of this is standard knowledge, but a study by Dr. Jorge Serrador revealed that there is a correlation between brain freeze and migraine sufferers. His research found that those suffering from migraines are more likely to get brain freeze, which suggests that there may be similar biological processes at work. Understanding how the contraction and widening of blood vessels in the brain take place may help scientists develop better headache medicines.

The white man's ideals and values together with the patterns of society to which they gave rise had not been evolved for racially or culturally mixed societies. They came under increasing strain or cracked in proportion as the area of white influence widened on the globe. In the resulting conflicts, the peoples of colour developed syncretic cultures to adapt to the demands of survival in the conditions created by white domination. In time the colonial peoples of Africa, the Americas and Asia found themselves divided into the traditionalists and the syncretists. . . . English is the link which binds this vast conglomerate of races and cultures. It assumes different forms in each racio-cultural milieu and develops different perspectives. the common differences create the peculiar consensus and identity which distinguish the English-speaking world from the others.

These examinations and certificates and so on —what did they matter? And all this efficiency and up-to-dateness —what did THAT matter, either? Ralston was trying to run Brookfield like a factory—a factory for turning out a snob culture based on money and machines. The old gentlemanly traditions of family and broad acres were changing, as doubtless they were bound to; but instead of widening them to form a genuine inclusive democracy of duke and dustman, Ralston was narrowing them upon the single issue of a fat banking account. There never had been so many rich men's sons at Brookfield. The Speech Day Garden Party was like Ascot.

The cultural distance between our churches and communities continues to widen, making it harder and harder to communicate the gospel. Being missional means moving intentionally beyond our church preferences, making missional decisions rather than preferential decisions. Today, people, churches, and denominations desperately need to apply the lens of intentional missiology to North America, not just international fields. The most effective comeback churches will be those that intentionally think like missionaries in their context.

...Lance is the inevitable product of our celebrity-worshipping culture and the whole money-mad world of sports gone amok. This is the Golden Age of fraud, an era of general willingness to ignore and justify the wrongdoings of the rich and powerful, which makes every lie bigger and widens its destructive path.