#idolatry

Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object. ↗

— Northrop Frye

#culture #destroy #essential #forms #idolatry

You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it never Rises from the soul, and sways The heart of every single hearer, With deepest power, in simple ways. You’ll sit forever, gluing things together, Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps, Blowing on a miserable fire, Made from your heap of dying ash. Let apes and children praise your art, If their admiration’s to your taste, But you’ll never speak from heart to heart, Unless it rises up from your heart’s space. ↗

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

#art #idolatry #individuality #legacy #love

By giving us control, our new technologies tend to enhance existing idols in our lives. Instead of becoming more like Christ through the forming and shaping influence of the church community, we form, and shape, and personalize our community to make it more like us. We take control of things that are not ours to control. Could it be that our desire for control is short-circuiting the process of change and transformation God wants us to experience through the mess of real world, flesh and blood, face-to-face relationships? ↗

— Tim Challies

#discipleship #idolatry #change

Idolatry' is the practice of seeking the source and provision of what we need either physically or emotionally in someone or something other than the one true God. It is the tragically pathetic attempt to squeeze life out of lifeless forms that cannot help us meet our real needs. ↗

— Scott J. Hafemann

#faith

We imagine that a little anxiety and worry is an indication of how wise we really are; it may be an indication of how wicked we really are. ↗

— Oswald Chambers

#idolatry #worry #imagination

The author points to the impact of what he called Dutch disease, where the discovery of found wealth from a particular commodity causes a culture to atrophy with respect to work ethic and broader development. Continuing wealth from the single commodity is taken for granted. The government, flush with wealth, is expected to be generous. When the price of that commodity drops, a government which would remain in power dare not cut back on this generosity. ↗

— Daniel Yergin

#idolatry #materialism #prosperity #money

When anything in life is an absolute requirement for your happiness and self-worth, it is essentially an ‘idol,’ something you are actually worshiping. When such a thing is threatened, your anger is absolute. Your anger is actually the way the idol keeps you in its service, in its chains. Therefore if you find that, despite all the efforts to forgive, your anger and bitterness cannot subside, you may need to look deeper and ask, ‘What am I defending? What is so important that I cannot live without?’ It may be that, until some inordinate desire is identified and confronted, you will not be able to master your anger. ↗

— Timothy Keller

#bitterness #forgiveness #happiness #idolatry #security

In my teens, I developed a passionate idolatry for a teacher of English literature. I wanted to do something that he would approve of more, so I thought I should be some sort of a scholar. ↗

— Trevor Nunn

#developed #english #english literature #i #idolatry

Families are nothing other than the idolatry of duty. ↗

— Ann Oakley

#families #idolatry #nothing #other #than

Idolatry, then, is always polytheism, an aimless passing from one lord to another. Idolatry does not offer a journey but rather a plethora of paths leading nowhere and forming a vast labyrinth. ↗

— Pope Francis

#idolatry #polytheism #faith