Page 11 - Jacques Ellul News Today

Nuit de la Carte Postale - Entretien 1/4 avec Sébastien Lapaque qui, dans ce premier entretien de la nuit, explique pourquoi il a écrit une "Théorie de la carte postale" et comment la carte postale, entre œuvre d'art et usage social, est autant un objet ethnologique qu'un support poétique.[...]

by Edward Curtin / June 4th, 2021 Life is full of slips. Words slip out of our mouths to surprise us.  Thoughts slip into our minds to shock us.  Dreams slip into our nights to sometimes slip into our waking thoughts to startle us.  And, as the wonderful singer/songwriter Paul Simon, sings, we are always “slip sliding away,” a reminder that can be a spur to courage and freedom or an inducement to fear and shut-upness. Slips are double-edged. It is obvious that since September 11, 2001, a...

Numbers in New empty tomb Book Locate the Heart of the Dying Churchs Choice: Serve God, in Jesus Name, With Money on a Scale With Global Need — or Serve Money Share Article Data in empty tombs new book, as well as various surveys, point to trends suggesting the church in the U.S. is dying. The church can serve God, in Jesus name, with money to reach global child-death reduction goals. Or the church can continue present patterns. The State of Church Giving through 2018 Fig. 9 and Fig. 14 The...

Heart of dying church’s choice: serve God with $s on global need scale or serve money Numbers in empty tomb’s latest book point to downward trends in church giving and membership. To change the trends, the church needs to serve God with money by offering a vision on a scale with global need that will capture the imaginations and attract the giving of members and those still identifying with the church. It will, however, take initial leadership from individual venture philanthropists to mobi...

Is God alive and well? Debate: the need to believe Is religious belief (not necessarily in any traditional theology) so wired into the human brain and essential to human society that it can never end? Will anything that destroys a religion become a replacement for that religion? Will history’s tide of rationality at last turn? by Jacques Bouveresse  Rationalists seem to believe that religion should be replaceable by something other than a religion. Their proposition has been counte...

Dialectic Brainwashing is the most conservative form of information control because it uses force to change minds. Propaganda, as we have seen in my last article, can be used by both conservatives and liberals. Both forms of entertainment are really politically apathetic, as they try to distract and provide escape from political and economic realities. Rhetoric is the essence of liberal viewpoints dating all the way back to debate among the classical Greeks. Dialectic was also used among the Gr...

Ronnie McBrayer Jacques Ellul once said, “In a society like ours, it is almost impossible for a person to be held responsible for anything. For each person carries out an individual task disconnected from the whole.” He then illustrated his point by example of a bursting dam.  The dam breaks. A village is washed away. There is incalculable human loss. Who is responsible? No, not “who should be scapegoated?” Just simple responsibility: Whose action or inaction, neglect or incompetence, ...

April 1, 2021 We ought to ask ourselves what public schools will look like and feel like once radical educrats and politicos agree to reopen them. I think schools will re-open across the board, but only when our ruling class is good and ready for that. The big question is what the Wuhan-induced closures seem to accomplish for these elites and what sort of school-scape they have envisioned for the future. What will the student body look like? The parents of public-school students? The curriculum...

Hopelessly polarized though our era in global politics seems, we may be grateful that it pales in comparison with the first half of the twentieth century. What had begun as a rhetorical battle between competing political ideals ended with total war. The tendency for grand political narratives to fanaticize and foster totalitarianism inspired The Open Society and Its Enemies, a famous 1945 book by the Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper. The book’s message for us today is that the threat...

The Convivial Society   To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.” — Wendell Berry, “To know the dark” Welcome to the latest installment of the Convivial Society, especially to those of you who are relatively new around here. This is a full newsletter with a longish essay and much else. Also, this time around, I’m not addressing a crisis de jour, and I hope that comes off as a feature rat...