The Death of Christian Culture Quotes

“It is said that Christianity, if it is to survive, must face the modern world, must come to terms with the way things are in the sense of the current drift of things. It is just the other way around: If we are to survive, we must face Christianity. The strongest reactionary force impeding progress is the cult of progress itself, which, cutting us off from our roots, makes growth impossible and choice unnecessary. We expire in the lazy, utterly helpless drift, the spongy warmth of an absolute uncertainty. Where nothing is ever true, or right or wrong, there are no problems; where life is meaningless we are free from responsibility, the way a slave or scavenger is free. Futility breeds carelessness, against which stands the stark alternative: against the radical uncertainty by which modern man has lived – as in a game of Russian roulette, stifled in the careless “now” between the click and the explosion, living by the dull grace of empty chambers – the risk of certainty. —John Senior, Ph.D.”
― John Senior, The Death of Christian Culture

“Literature is the ox of culture, its beast of burden. Without it we have no means of bearing culture.”
― John Senior, The Death of Christian Culture

“The strongest reactionary force impeding progress is the cult of progress itself, which, cutting us off from our roots, makes growth impossible and choice unnecessary.”
― John Senior, The Death of Christian Culture

“Culture, as in “agriculture”, is the cultivation of the soil from which men grow. To determine proper methods, we must have a clear idea of the crop. “What is man?” the Penny Catechism asks, and answers: “A creature made in the image and likeness of God, to know, love, and serve Him.” Culture, therefore, clearly has this simple end, no matter how complex or difficult the means. Our happiness consists in a perfection that is no mere endless hedonistic whoosh through space and time, but the achievement of that definite love and knowledge which is final and complete. All the paraphernalia of our lives, intellectual, moral, social, psychological, and physical, has this end: Christian culture is the cultivation of saints.”
― John Senior, The Death of Christian Culture

“Sentimentality is “subjecting reason to desire,” as Dante says of carnal sinners in the Inferno, putting reason to the use of feeling rather than the right way around. Gluttons, for example, spend their intelligence in the service of their bellies; and so it is with the avaricious and those who cannot control their tempers or who are infantile about sex. Mere sentimentality is a pathetic thing. It is the vice of weak people, disdained rather than abhorred, an object of ridicule rather than wrath.”
― John Senior, The Death of Christian Culture

“One or two percent of any society is always subcultural. The Trotskyite, the Communist, the arsonist, the homosexual, the assassin--these are obviously dangerous and the courts must dispose their cases. Law has its problems. I shall not underestimate them; but law is not the problem. The enemy I am talking about is the one lurking in the guts of the whole nation like an invisible and deadly virus. It is not an action, but an attitude that says everyone has the right to arson, murder, rape, because doing those things is necessarily included under the rubric of freedom, of doing what one wants--not what I want or you want, but what someone wants. In a word, we have raised the abnormal and aberrant to the condition of a human right. The beast is loose among us, and he is welcome in our universities and homes.”
― John Senior, The Death of Christian Culture

“What is an adventure? It is a putting of oneself forward to meet the unexpected, the risk of what we have in favor of what we might have, the known in favor of the unknown, staking something on the future – life itself put to the chance of disaster and success.”
― John Senior, The Death of Christian Culture

“It is not really capital punishment that bothers sentimentalists, though they use it as the cutting edge of their argument. They object to punishment itself; and that is because they deny the existence of justice; and that is because they deny that man is free, that man is responsible for his acts. Crime, they say, is sickness. It must be cured or, better, prevented by a prophylaxis of the spirit, by the extermination of free will altogether so that men will react like Pavlov’s dogs to sensitivity training and even to psychosurgery and drugs. Crime, they say, is caused by a psychological malfunction. It is unjust, they say, to punish a man for heart disease and so unjust to punish him for theft.”
― John Senior, The Death of Christian Culture

“A lie is not the mere absence of truth, not silence, but the active assertion of what is not truth.”
― John Senior, The Death of Christian Culture

“The only way to look at anything is from some point of view, but some points of view are better than others; and the best is not the closest but the truest. If”
― John Senior, The Death of Christian Culture

“There is no such thing as victimless crime any more than a free lunch. There is no such thing as a Christianity in which the commandments of God are accommodated to the Rights of Man.”
― John Senior, The Death of Christian Culture

“Las palabras –decía el sombrerero loco a Alicia– significan exactamente lo que yo digo que significan”. ¡Ve al comienzo! Arranca”
― John Senior, La muerte de la cultura cristiana

“Civilization is not the creation of its outlaws but of men who have worked hard in the sweat of their brows, building on the past – against the outlaws, the immoralists, the advocates of violence and death. In obedience to natural law and by the grace of God, a few good men have stemmed the blood-dimmed tide in every generation, though now it seems to some as if, at last, we were going under.”
― John Senior, The Death of Christian Culture

“Sin la Iglesia, aún quebrada como está, la oscuridad sería insoportable. Para quienes se hallan al borde de la desesperación, especialmente ahora, es esencial recordar que la Iglesia nunca se parece tanto a Cristo como cuando se ve herida y traicionada desde dentro”. No hay ciertamente hoy, señala Senior, ninguna razón para seguir siendo católico distinta de la que siempre existió: que en la vida invisible de la Iglesia se encuentra el amor de Cristo.”
― John Senior, La muerte de la cultura cristiana

“The divorce from reality is a divorce also from morality, because good and bad are matters of intellectual judgment about things. As Aristotle explained in the passages cited, the reduction of reality to sensation does away with difference in essence. And if everything happens accidentally, there is no right and wrong.”
― John Senior, The Death of Christian Culture

“Christian doctrine is not the result of convention, though it is indeed traditional: “All things have been handed down to me by the Father.” Christianity can never serve the times.”
― John Senior, The Death of Christian Culture