Zwingli had considered the word of God to be the privileged medium precisely because it made no appeal (in his view) to the sensuous domain of the body as constructed by sight. "Why," he asked rhetorically, "do we not send images to unbelievers so that they can learn belief from them?" Why indeed, Sallman's publishers may well have asked, for they supplied a global market with images of Jesus, which church groups and religious organizations sent around the world during World War II and after. Yet, to take Zwingli's point, which was, in effect, substantially expanded and explored by Roland Barthes: the message of the photographic image is imbricated with the textual codes of discourse, which connote something other than what we see. But we naturalize the codes by taking the image to signify them. This operation of connotation or imbrication is not limited to the photograph, however. Sallman's imagery naturalizes what his viewers think or have been told to think, and it is able to do so in no small way because of the massive dissemination of his work. People often see it and have continually seen it since childhood in so many places that it acquires a kind of de facto normative stature. As many people say, it's what Jesus looks like.

—David Morgan, Icons of American Protestantism: The Art of Warner Sallman

[Plymouth Rock] has become an object of veneration in the United States. I have seen bits of it carefully preserved in several towns of the Union. Does not this sufficiently show how all human power and greatness are entirely in the soul? Here is a stone which the feet of a few poor fugitives pressed for an instant, and this stone becomes famous; it is treasured by a great nation, a fragment is prized as a relic. But what has become of the doorsteps of a thousand palaces? Who troubles himself about them?

—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

By dispensing with totalizing metanarratives, postmodernism is left without the conceptual resources to understand the voice of the other at all. There is no human nature, language is merely a social construction unrelated to objective reality, and there is no God-given meaning or value in the world. Therefore, various cultures and kinds of people become opaque to one another—monads of otherness, as it were.

—Douglas Groothuis, Truth Decay

One lies when affirming the opposite of what one takes to be objectively true: either affirming what should be denied or denying what should be affirmed, given the facts of the matter. However, if everything is a matter of interpretation or redescription or perspective all the way down, then there are no bedrock facts at all—no facts to relay and no facts to obscure. One's words create all the reality we can ever "know." The clear consequence of such a view is that lies are nonexistent because they are impossible. This is so radically counterintuitive as to be absurd.

—Douglas Groothuis, Truth Decay

Having done away with innate ideas, having altogether renounced the vanity of believing that we are always thinking, Locke proves that all our ideas come to us through the senses, examines our ideas both simple and complex, follows the human mind in all its operations, and shows the imperfections of all the languages spoken by man, and our constant abuse of terms. He comes at last to consider the extent, or rather the nothingness, of human knowledge.

—Voltaire, Philosophical Letters

One idea has however lingered in the mind even of the genuine man of science as a result of all this romantic theorizing—namely that man has access to the infinite only through nature.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

Most men according to Rousseau are perverted by society, but there are a few in whom the voice of "nature" is still strong and who, to be good and at the same time beautiful, have only to let themselves go. These, to use a term that came to have in the eighteenth century an almost technical meaning, are the "beautiful souls." Those whose souls are beautiful are a small transfigured band in the midst of a philistine multitude. They are not to be judged by the same rules as those of less exquisite sensibility.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

The man who plants himself, not on outer authority but on experience, is an individualist. To be modern in the sense I have defined is not only to be positive and critical, but also—and this from the time of Petrarch—to be individualistic. The establishment of a sound type of individualism is indeed the specifically modern problem.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

Out of the turmoil incidental to the Great Revival came a number of schisms among the evangelical denominations active in the West. Doctrinally conservative, the Presbyterians were quick to scent heresy and to throw out the unorthodox. As a result, they soon began to divide by fission. New Lights, Cumberland Presbyterians, Seceders, Old School and New School Presbyterians, and many other names for dissident groups indicate the division within the ranks. The Baptists and Methodists were also riven by controversy. But these sectarian divisions owe less to the frontier than they do to the beliefs implicit in Protestantism. They merely illustrate a tendency which had been in operation since the Reformation. When the Reformers conceded that men could read and interpret the Scriptures according to the dictates of their consciences and could dispense with a priest as intercessor with God, they opened a Pandora's box which they could never close thereafter.

—Louis B. Wright, Culture on the Moving Frontier

"Emotional intensity" doesn't convey the half of it, of course. It is the kind of coarse and disappointing translation that makes the dismembered bodies of samurai warriors spin in their graves. The word "zanshin" is larded down with a lot of other folderol that you have to be Nipponese to understand.

—Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

Luther reflected the humanism of the sixteenth century. This new approach is not to be confused with the secular humanism of our own day. Humanism expressed the Renaissance spirit emphasizing a return to Greek and Roman cultures. It was, in many ways, a reactionary movement against the Medieval traditions. That approach, called scholasticism, underscored the later Latin fathers and Aristotle's thought. Scholasticism emphasized the Medieval commentaries on Aristotle—and even on the commentaries on the commentaries—rather than on Aristotle's writings primarily. Like scaffolding around a building, these commentaries blocked a direct line to the sources themselves. Humanism proposed moving beyond the scaffolding with the battlecry, "Ad Fontes," to the fount, or to the source. And in this spirit, Luther went beyond the scaffolding that obstructed the Bible and went straight to the biblical text.

—Stephen J. Nichols, Martin Luther: A guided tour of his life and thought

What sort of freak then is man! How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, glory and refuse of the universe! Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature! Learn that man infinitely transcends man, hear from your master your true condition, which is unknown to you. Listen to God.

—Blaise Pascal, Thoughts

We know well enough how people in this frame of mind behave. They think they have made great efforts to learn when they have spent a few hours reading some book of the Bible, and have questioned some ecclesiastic about the truths of the faith. After that they boast that they have sought without success in books and among men. But, in fact, I should say to them what I have often said: such negligence is intolerable.

—Blaise Pascal, Thoughts

What makes our inability to know things absolute is that they are so simple in themselves, while we are composed of two opposing natures of different kinds, soul and body. For it is impossible for the part of us which reasons to be anything but spiritual, and even if it were claimed that we are simply corporeal, that would still more preclude us from knowing things, since there is nothing so inconceivable as the idea that matter knows itself. We cannot possibly know how it could know itself. Thus, if we are simply material, we can know nothing at all, and, if we are composed of mind and matter, we cannot have perfect knowledge of things which are simply spiritual or corporeal.

—Blaise Pascal, Thoughts

Pickering structured his life in Washington as though determined to diminish the possibility that any of his misperceptions might be challenged. He seldom attended social gatherings where Jeffersonians might be present and exchanged views with members of the opposition only on the floor of the Senate. Living at Coyle's was in itself a defense against foreign ideas. There, the little group of embattled Federalists spent evenings by the hearthside reinforcing one another's prejudices.

—Gerald H. Clarfield, Timothy Pickering and the American Republic

It cannot be denied that the opinions of the Protestants, being founded on inquiry, are more favorable to knowledge and to the spirit of liberty than the Catholic religion, which decides everything by authority and considers kings equally infallible with popes, unless popes happen to be at war with kings.

—Germaine de Staël, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution

Those who believe in free will would do well to contemplate yet another implication of the age of accountability. The incidence of infant mortality has only dropped significantly in this century. This means that, if the age of accountability were true, most of those in heaven, perhaps most of the human race, have made it to heaven without exercising their will at all! This would mean that throughout all of history the primary means of salvation was not repentance and faith but death. It would also mean that abortionists are sending more souls to heaven than all the soul winners in the world! When man tries to improve on theology he perverts it and only brings judgment upon himself.

—Mark Rushdoony, "What is Wrong with Free Will?" in The Great Christian Revolution

Love, with very young people, is a very heartless business. We drink at that age from thirst, or to get drunk; it is only later in life that we occupy ourselves with the individuality of our wine. A young man in love is essentially enraptured by the forces within himself. You may come back to that view again, in a second adolescence. I knew a very old Russian in Paris, enormously rich, who used to keep the most charming young dancers, and who, when once asked whether he had, or needed to have, any illusions as to their feelings for him, thought the question over and said: "I do not think, if my chef succeeds in making me a good omelette, that I bother much whether he loves me or not." A young man could not have put his answer into those words, but he might say that he did not care whether his wine merchant was of his own religion or not, and imagine that he had got close to the truth of things. In middle age, though, you arrive at a deeper humility, and you come to consider it of importance that the person who sells or grows your wine shall be of the same religion as you yourself.

—Isak Dinesen, "The Old Chevalier" from Seven Gothic Tales

Finally, he warns that this materialism must be "absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door". That final phrase points to what's really at stake in the evolution controversy. Why does Lewontin urge us to define science as applied materialism? Because otherwise we might let a "divine foot in the door." And we all know what happens then: When a salesman gets his foot in the door, pretty soon his brooms and brushes are all over your living room.

—Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity

It may seem paradoxical that a philosophy of radical individualism would lead to radical statism. But disconnected, isolated individuals are actually the most vulnerable to totalitarian control because they have no competing identity or loyalties.

—Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity