Why You Think the Way You Do Quotes

“God created all things and is interested in all things. All truth, then, is God’s truth, and all areas of learning and all ethical jobs are legitimate areas of service to him and are part of what goes into building his kingdom. We must develop a kingdom perspective on our work in every sector of the economy, whether manufacturing, service industries, business, finance, education, health care, arts, or media. On a social level, we need to provide meaningful work for others and seek to eliminate drudgery as much as possible, and so to affirm the dignity of the people around us. We also have the right to enjoy the fruits of our labor. Government has its legitimate functions and can collect taxes for those purposes, but we should be permitted to keep the bulk of what we earn.”
― Glenn S. Sunshine, Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home

“Rome did not so much fall as collapse under its own weight. Germanic migrations, a corrupt and ineffectual government, insecurity within the borders, a breakdown of trade, and an economy built on slavery when the end of territorial expansion shut down new sources of slaves — all combined to destabilize Roman society. Add to that a colder and wetter climate that made it more difficult to grow crops, and this spelled disaster for at least the western, Latin-speaking half of the Empire.”
― Glenn S. Sunshine, Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home

“Christianity is a religion founded more on ideas than on practices. Yet the Bible does not directly answer a number of questions that arise naturally from its teaching, and nowhere does it include a systematic statement of doctrine or even a list of the essentials of the faith. As a result, the church historically has valued study, logic, and reason as religious activities in a way that differs significantly from paganism and even Judaism and Islam (which are religions based primarily on practice, not doctrine).”
― Glenn S. Sunshine, Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home

“While other Muslim scholars wrote plague tracts without generating the same kind of hostility, Ibn al-Khatib’s fate is illustrative of an important worldview difference between Islam and Christianity. In Europe, plague may have caused popular hysteria, but the church and the scholars agreed that it was a natural event and sought to find both the physical explanation for the plague and a cure. The church opposed efforts to scapegoat Jews for causing the plague, pointing out that they were dying from it just as Christians were. Church and government officials also rejected the idea, put forth by groups such as the Flagellants, that the plague was a direct judgment of God on a corrupt society. Instead, they argued it was a natural phenomenon.”
― Glenn S. Sunshine, Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home

“Muslim scholars excelled at practical learning such as geography, astronomy, and medical practice, as well as mathematics (including inventing algebra). What they did not do, however, was develop science, in the sense of explanations of why the physical world works the way it does. This highlights the second difference between orthodox Muslim thinkers, such as al-Ghazali, and the Condemnations of 1277. Islam teaches that Allah directly controls everything and can do as he pleases with the world. Seeking explanations of physical processes was thus either not possible or inappropriate”
― Glenn S. Sunshine, Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home

“The medieval mind assumed that the rational God created a rational universe and that human beings, made in the image of God, were rational as well and could understand the universe.”
― Glenn S. Sunshine, Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home

“As Arab armies conquered Syria (which had been part of the Roman and Byzantine empires), they found Syriac translations of Greek philosophical works. These writings were translated into Arabic, and for a time they became the foundation of Muslim philosophy. Eventually, they were rejected as being inconsistent with Islam. The mullahs decided that Muslims could accept practical works from the conquered people, but speculative thought was out. Christians, however, had long since made their peace with integrating pagan philosophy with the Bible. In fact, since the time of the early Christian writers, theologians had argued that just as the Hebrew prophets were the Jewish world’s road to the truth best expressed in Christianity, philosophers were the pagan world’s road to that same truth. So when Christian scholars found out about the works of Aristotle in Spain, they began to translate them into Latin, the language of the church and of scholarship. These new texts immediately caused a buzz in the scholarly community, because here was a complete, well-developed worldview that answered all of the key philosophical questions that medieval scholars had grappled with. The only question was how to integrate the “New Aristotle” into the intellectual synthesis already in place with the advent of Platonic humanism.”
― Glenn S. Sunshine, Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home

“Even before the universities, however, a new worldview emerged in the cathedral schools that had been anticipated in many ways by the movement away from reliance on supernatural intervention in law. Labeled “Platonic humanism” by historian R. W. Southern, this worldview was based on the idea that the world came from God and thus can lead us back to God. Without going as far as the ancient Platonic hierarchy of being, twelfth-century scholars believed that the world reflected the God who created it — the “Platonic” part of the worldview — and therefore that studying the world can tell us about God. God created the world separate from himself, and since he is rational, the world he created is also rational and subject to rational analysis. Since human beings are created in the image of God, we also are rational and thus understand the world. Though miracles can and do happen, both the world and human nature have their own integrity apart from God and can be studied and understood without recourse to divine intervention — the “humanist” part of Platonic humanism.”
― Glenn S. Sunshine, Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home

“Monastic schools located in the countryside provided most of the education in Europe. With the urban boom of the eleventh century and the growing strictness of the monasteries brought about by church reform, cathedrals once again began opening schools (or, in a few cases, expanding existing schools) in the cities.”
― Glenn S. Sunshine, Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home

“In general, “laying foundations” is a good summary of the first half-millennium after the fall of Rome. Scholarship may have been stagnant, but it preserved the ancient texts that enabled medieval scholarship to flourish later. Charlemagne laid the foundation for the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, the central political authority of medieval society. Manorialism laid the foundation for the rural economy, and feudalism for the basic political system that would govern most of Europe during the rest of the Middle Ages.”
― Glenn S. Sunshine, Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home

“the Irish thought of education as essential for a man of God. Irish monasteries became the main educational centers in Europe during the sixth and seventh centuries. These centers included the continent’s major scriptoria (places where manuscripts were copied) at Luxeuil and Bobbio in France, and particularly a major school at York in England, another church founded by Irish missionaries. In fact, in the late 700s, over a century after the reintroduction of education to the continent, when Charlemagne decided he wanted to overhaul education in his empire, the best scholar he could find was Alcuin, a deacon at York. So Charlemagne sent for him, and Alcuin developed a system of schools, textual study, and copying that laid the foundation for the later widespread revival of education in Europe.”
― Glenn S. Sunshine, Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home

“As the various barbarian tribes took over different parts of the Empire, they attempted with varying degrees of success to main tain Roman administration, though with their own personnel overseeing it. As they converted to Christianity, they frequently put bishops into their governments as well. Unfortunately, Germanic and Roman principles for governing were radically different, and as a result it took centuries before a stable system would emerge, one drawn from blending the Roman and Germanic cultures with Christianity. That system, known as feudalism, was based on personal bonds (an element of German culture) regulated by oaths (again, German) and a legal contract (an element of Roman culture). The basic idea was that the proper structure for a society was based on lordship, in which one person was owed allegiance and service from others. This applied not only in the political realm but in the economic as well (where it is called “manorialism”). As in any society, politics and economics were tied together by fundamental ideas about the “natural” way people should relate to each other.”
― Glenn S. Sunshine, Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home

“With the legalization of Christianity, the opportunity to be martyred disappeared. As a result, people who wanted to prove their faith turned to “white martyrdom” — the living of a strict, ascetic life — as the most viable alternative to actual martyrdom.”
― Glenn S. Sunshine, Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home

“The transition from being a persecuted minority religion to being the favored faith of the emperor inevitably forged ties between church and state that have been a driving force in Western political life ever since.”
― Glenn S. Sunshine, Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home

“It would be hard enough to win the Empire to Christianity without Christians arguing among themselves about what they were supposed to believe.”
― Glenn S. Sunshine, Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home

“No other civilization anywhere in history ever moved in this direction — only the West, under the influence of Christian principles. Along with equality came the idea of inalienable, God-given rights, which led to the Enlightenment emphasis on life, liberty, property, and virtue.”
― Glenn S. Sunshine, Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home

“This is where the scholastic method comes in. The method consists of five parts. 1. Ask a question. 2. List the authorities that addressed the question and divide them into categories, pro and con. 3. Using a combination of logical tools from Aristotle and surprisingly sophisticated methods of linguistic analysis, analyze the authorities with the goal of resolving as many of the apparent contradictions as possible. 4. Present the solution to the problem. 5. Argue against your solution from as many angles as possible and respond to these anticipated objections. Scholasticism was tailor-made to allow large amounts of new material to be integrated into an existing body of knowledge.”
― Glenn S. Sunshine, Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home

“To the Christian, the route to a meaningful life was found in sacrificial service to others in imitation of Jesus.”
― Glenn S. Sunshine, Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home

“Not only are people created in the image of God, but all people are spiritually equal before God. More than anything else, this idea separated Judaism, which was a national or ethnic religion, from Christianity. Jews and Gentiles, men and women, slaves and free, Romans and barbarians, all were welcome in the church as equals.”
― Glenn S. Sunshine, Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home