Saving Leonardo Quotes

“secularism is not neutral, though it often claims to be. In relation to the biblical God, secularists may be skeptics. But in relation to their own god substitutes, they are true believers. To adapt an observation from C. S. Lewis, their skepticism is only on the surface. It is for use on other people’s beliefs. “They are not nearly skeptical enough” about their own beliefs.83 And when they enforce secular views in the realm of law, education, sexuality, and health care, they are imposing their own beliefs on everyone else across an entire society. The consequence of those secular views is inevitably dehumanizing. The reason is that secularism in all its forms is reductionistic. A worldview that does not start with God must start with something less than God—something within creation—which then becomes the category to explain all of reality. Think back to Walker Percy’s metaphor of a box. Empiricism puts everything in the box of the senses. Rationalism puts everything into the box of human reason. Anything that does not fit into the box is denied, denigrated, or declared to be unreal. The diverse and multi-faceted world God created is reduced to a single category.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“A biblically based worldview is capable of affirming the best insights of secular philosophies without ever falling into reductionism.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“Secular ideologies preach liberty but practice tyranny.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“As Schaeffer once wrote, there is nothing uglier than theological orthodoxy without understanding or compassion.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“Ironically, moral relativists often even pride themselves on being morally superior to others.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“Every religion offers an interpretation of the world, a worldview, a counterpart to the biblical narrative of creation, fall, redemption. Translated into worldview terms, creation refers to a theory of origins: Where did we come from? What is ultimate reality? Fall refers to the problem of evil: What’s wrong with the world, the source of evil and suffering? Redemption asks, How can the problem be fixed? What must I do to become part of the solution? These are the three fundamental questions that every religion, worldview, or philosophy seeks to answer.16 The answers offered by Romanticism were adapted from neo-Platonism.17 In neo-Platonism, the counterpart to creation, or the ultimate source of all things, is a primordial spiritual essence or unity referred to as the One, the Absolute, the Infinite. Even thinking cannot be attributed to the One because thought implies a distinction between subject and object—between the thinker and the object of his thought. In fact, for the Romantics, thinking itself constituted the fall, the cause of all that is wrong with the world. Why? Because it introduced division into the original unity. More precisely, the fault lay in a particular kind of thinking—the Enlightenment reductionism that had produced the upper/lower story dichotomy in the first place. Coleridge wrote that “the rational instinct” posed “the original temptation, through which man fell.” The poet Friedrich Schiller blamed the “all-dividing Intellect” for modern society’s fragmentation, conflict, isolation, and alienation. And what would redeem us from this fall? The creative imagination. Art would restore the spiritual meaning and purpose that Enlightenment science had stripped from the world.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“Richard Lovelace makes a compelling case that the best defense is a good offense. “The ultimate solution to cultural decay is not so much the repression of bad culture as the production of sound and healthy culture,” he writes. “We should direct most of our energy not to the censorship of decadent culture, but to the production and support of healthy expressions of Christian and non-Christian art.”10 Public protests and boycotts have their place. But even negative critiques are effective only when motivated by a genuine love for the arts. The long-term solution is to support Christian artists, musicians, authors, and screenwriters who can create humane and healthy alternatives that speak deeply to the human condition. Exploiting “Talent” The church must also stand against forces that suppress genuine creativity, both inside and outside its walls. In today’s consumer culture, one of the greatest dangers facing the arts is commodification. Art is treated as merchandise to market for the sake of making money. Paintings are bought not to exhibit, nor to grace someone’s home, but merely to resell. They are financial investments. As Seerveld points out, “Elite art of the New York school or by approved gurus such as Andy Warhol are as much a Big Business today as the music business or the sports industry.”11 Artists and writers have been reduced to “talent” to be plugged into the manufacturing process. That approach may increase sales, but it will suppress the best and highest forms of art. In the eighteenth century, the world nearly lost the best of Mozart’s music because the adults in the young man’s life treated him primarily as “talent” to exploit.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“Reductionism is like a kid who argues that whatever does not fit into his toy box is not a toy.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“Art is a visual language, and Christians have a responsibility to learn that language.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“Frank Sheed once said, “The secular novelist sees what is visible; the Christian novelist sees what is there.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“For when moral convictions are reduced to arbitrary preferences, then they can no longer be debated rationally.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“Only people who understand that Christianity is true to the real world are capable of the relaxed confidence that allows them to be open, patient, and loving toward those who differ from them.”
― Nancy R. Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“The Galileo saga is typically told as a conflict between science and religion. But in reality it was a conflict among Christians over the correct philosophy of nature. Was it Aristotle’s quality or Galileo’s quantity? Galileo’s victory was the triumph of the idea that the nature is constructed on a mathematical blueprint.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“Voddie Baucham, a former all-American football player, offers a catchy athletic metaphor. “Sending young people into the world without a biblical worldview,” he says, “is like sending a ballplayer onto the field without a playbook.”17 Team spirit is not enough. An athlete needs to comprehend the game’s strategy.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“It is becoming clear that much of what used to be considered common sense is not common at all. Instead it is a product of the West’s distinctively Christian heritage. Today it can no longer be simply assumed. It has to be intentionally articulated and defended.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“In a book called Why Americans Hate Politics, E. J. Dionne says, “Americans hate politics as it is now practiced because we have lost all sense of the public good.”4 Without the conviction that there exists an objective good, public debate disintegrates into a cacophony of warring voices.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“The only basis for genuine human rights and dignity is a fully biblical worldview. Because Christianity begins with a transcendent Creator, it does not idolize any part of creation. And therefore it does not deny or denigrate any other parts. As a result, it has the conceptual resources to provide a holistic, inclusive worldview that is humane and life affirming. This is good news indeed. It is the only approach capable of healing the split in the Western mind and restoring liberty in Western society.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“The fact/value split has taught most people to put religion in the same category. This explains why Christians are often accused of imposing their views, no matter how gentle and polite they may be in person. Christians intend to communicate life-giving, objective truths about the real world. But their statements are interpreted as attempts to impose personal preferences. For the secularist, then, Christians are not merely wrong or mistaken. They are violating the rules of the game in a democratic society.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“Choosing a religion, says philosopher Ernest Gellner, has become akin to choosing a wallpaper pattern or menu item—an area of life where it is considered acceptable to act on purely personal taste or feelings. Most”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“Biblical theology itself can be understood as a narrative. The story line has three fundamental turning points—creation, fall, and redemption (leading to a final glorification). The account begins with creation, which means that even today, the world continues to bear signs of the beauty and wonder of its original creation. But its perfection was shattered by the tragedy of the fall into sin, erupting into war, injustice, and oppression. Throughout history, the forces of good and evil have engaged in cosmic battle—until, finally, history reached its climax in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In Christ, God himself entered the space/time world to share the human condition. By suffering injustice and death himself, he broke their power over us. Ever since that great turning point, God has been applying the effects of salvation to liberate captives and regain territory.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“Most of the founders of postmodernism were Europeans who had witnessed oppressive political systems up close—Nazism and Communism. Both these systems were organized around a single principle: race (Nazism) or economic class (Communism). Both embraced a grand vision of history moving inexorably toward some ideal society. And both ended up becoming totalitarian, using their utopian visions to justify secret police and death camps.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“The God of Christianity does not erase our individual identity but actually affirms it, calling us to become ever more fully the unique individuals we were created to be. Contrary to Eastern mysticism, the goal is not to suppress our desires, but to direct our desires to what truly satisfies—to a passionate love relationship with the ultimate Person.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“surprising as it may sound, pantheism is not really all that different from materialism. It is the flip side of the same coin. Materialism states that everything consists of material stuff. Pantheism states that everything consists of spiritual stuff. Both are non-personal. As a result, both worldviews fail to account for human personhood.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“Christians should be on the front lines fighting to liberate society from its captivity to secular worldviews.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“Government policy merely followed where the universities led.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“Only by demonstrating genuine compassion will Christians earn the right to offer a biblical alternative.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“The only basis for genuine human rights and dignity is a fully biblical worldview.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“Liberation theology often ends up as little more than theological frosting on a Marxist cake.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“Postmodernism started out seeking to unmask the implicit imperialism of modernist worldviews. But it has itself become imperialist, insisting that postmodernists alone have the ability to see through everyone else’s underlying interests and motives—to deconstruct and debunk them.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

“Lived out consistently, postmodernism leads to complicity with evil and injustice.”
― Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning