An Interesting Perspective On The Church of The Holy Sepulcher

"At the center of the old city [Jerusalem] stands the Church of The Holy Sepulcher, reputedly on the sight of the original Calvary and the original Garden if the Ressurection. It stands, but only because ugly steel scaffolding permanently supports the walls inside and out. This church is one of the dirtiest, most depressing buildings in all Christendom. It should be torn down and rebuilt. This is not possible, however, because the Church of The Holy Sepulcher belongs jointly to the Abyssinians, Armenians, Copts, Greeks, Syrians, and Roman Catholics, and their priests will hardly speak to oneanother, let alone cooperate in a joint enterprise of rebuilding. Each communion preserves its own seperate chapel, and conducts its own ceremonies; and to make the situation ludacrous, the keys of the church have been entrusted to a family of Muslims who in order to answer the call of Allah five times daily, have turned the entrance into a Muslim Mosque. Nowhere in the world can you find a more tragic symbol of the mutilation of Christ's body than the Church of The Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem."


~Arthur Leonard Griffith, God's Time and Ours (New York: Abingdon Press, 1964), 83.

Dualism's Effect on North American Christianity

"With a sharper thrust but from a different angle, Peter Berger moves beyond the role of the clergy in the secularization of the world to the role of Protestantism as a whole. He concludes that in their preoccupation with 'otherworldliness' and in their emphasis on redemption as 'personal and individual,' Protestants unwittingly abandoned the arena of this world itself, leaving it a vacated venue. The 'New Jerusalem' became the place of focus for them, and this world was relinquished to secular causes and activity, In effect, with 'angels' no longer in this world, the astronomer and, indeed, the astronaut could now interpret space and time."

~Ravi Zacharias, Deliver Us From Evil, 51.

Political Consequences of the Sophists

"It was the clear relativism of the Sophists, not the mystical insights of Plato, nor Aristotle's aspiration after the Supreme Good, which dominated the thinking of the classical Greeks in their decadence. The failure of the Greeks to find an enduring popular religious sanction for the order of civilization had been a main cause of the collapse of the world of the polis."

~Russel Kirk, The Roots of American Order, 93-94.

Social Commentary in Poetry

First dentistry was painless.
Then bicycles were chainless,
Carriages were horseless,
And many laws enforceless.
Next cookery was fireless,
Telegraphy was wireless,
Cigars were nictotineless,
And coffee caffineless.
Soon oranges were seedless,
The putting green was weedless,
The college buy was hatless,
The proper diet fatless.
New motor roads are dustless,
The latest steel is rustless,
Our tennis courts are sodless,
Our new religion-godless.

~Arthur Guiterman, "Gaily the Troubadour," from Gaily the Troubadour (New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, Inc., 1936).

A New Kind of Man - Reconceiving Identity and Society in 1957

Norman Mailer predicted a new kind of man in the 1950's who would enter the arena of ideological conflict:

"He was the hipster, who knew from the atom bomb and the Nazi concentration camps that societies and states were murderers, and that under the shadow of mass annihilation one should learn... to give up 'the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization,' to live in the moment, to follow the body and not the mind, 'to divorce oneself from society,' and 'to follow the rebellious imperative of the self,' to forget 'the single mate, the solid family, and the respectable love life,' to choose a life of 'Saturday night kicks,' especially orgasm and marijuana. For 1957, this was prophetic. It contained in a nutshell much of the self-liberation part of the cultural program of the sixties."

~Norman Mailer, "The White Negro," 1957. Quoted by Myron Magnet in The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass (New York: William Morrow, 1993), 35.