Jesus
“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not "perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.” (John 3:16-17)
Martin Buber
“In the relation to God, unconditional exclusiveness and unconditional inclusiveness are one. For those who enter into the absolute relationship, nothing particular retains any importance—neither things nor beings, neither earth nor heaven—but everything is included in the relationship. For entering into the pure relationship does not involve ignoring everything but seeing everything in the You, not renouncing the world but placing it upon its proper ground. Looking away from the world is no help toward God; staring at the world is no help either; but whoever beholds the world in him stands in his presences…” (from
I and Thou)
C.S. Lewis
“When I attempted a few minutes ago, to describe our spiritual longings, I was omitting one of their most curious characteristics. We usually notice it just as the moment of vision dies away, as the music ends, or as the landscape loses the celestial light… For a few minutes we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing. We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance. We may go when we please, we may stay if we can, no one cares. Now, a scientist may reply that since most of the things we call beautiful are inanimate it is not very surprising that they take no notice of us. That, of course, is true. It is not the physical objects that I am speaking of, but that indescribable Something of which they become for a moment the messengers. And part of the bitterness which mixes with the sweetness of that message is due to the fact that it so seldom seems to be a message intended for us, but rather something we have overheard. By bitterness I mean pain, not resentment. We should hardly dare to ask that any notice be taken of ourselves. But we pine. The sense that in the universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, the bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret.” (from
The Weight of Glory)
Terrence Malick
Badlands (1972)
Days of Heaven (1978)
The Thin Red Line (1998)
The New World (2005)
Martin Heidegger
“Truth is the truth of Being. Beauty does not occur alongside and apart from this truth. When truth sets itself into the work, it appears. Appearance—as this being of truth in the work and as work—is beauty. Thus the beautiful belongs to the advent of truth, truth’s taking of its place. It does not exist merely relative to pleasure and purely as its object.” (from “The Origin of the Work of Art.”)
Saint Paul
“Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” (I Corinthians 13:12)
Marshall McLuhan
“All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.” (from
The Medium is the Massage)
Sufjan Stevens
And in my best behavior
I am really just like him
Look beneath the floorboards
For the secrets I have hid
(from “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.”)
F. Scott Fitzgerald
“And as I sat there brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s long dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it, He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.” (from
The Great Gatsby)
Yasujiro Ozu
Tokyo Story (1953)
George Steiner
“All representations, even the most abstract, infer a rendezvous with intelligibility or, at the least, with a strangeness attenuated, qualified by observance and willed form. Apprehension (the meeting with the other) signifies both fear and perception. The continuum between both, the modulation from one to the other, lie at the source of poetry and the arts.” (from
Real Presences)
Paul Tillich
“What is the nature of a being that is able to produce art? Man is finite. He is, as one could say, mixed of being and nonbeing. Once he was not. Now he is and some time he will not be. He is not by himself, but thrown into existence and he will be thrown out of existence and cease to be for himself. He is delivered to the flux of time which runs from the past to the future through the ever-moving point which is called the present. He is aware of the infinite. He is aware that he belongs to it. But he is also aware that he is excluded from it… Out of the anxiety, and the double awareness that we are finite and that we belong to infinity from which we are excluded, the urge arises to express the essential unity of that which we are in symbols which are religious and artistic.” (from
On Art and Architecture)
Dorothy Sayers
“Poets have, indeed, often communicated in their own mode of expression truths identical with the theologians’ truths; but just because of the difference in the modes of expression, we often fail to see the identity of the statements.” (from
The Mind of the Maker)
Over the Rhine
What a beautiful piece of heartache this has all turned out to be.
Lord knows we've learned the hard way all about healthy apathy.
And I use these words pretty loosely.
There's so much more to life than words.
(from “Latter Days”)
Soren Kierkegaard
“He will grant thee a hiding place within Him, and once hidden in Him he will hide thy sins. For He is the friend of sinners... He does not merely stand still, open His arms and say, 'Come hither'; no, he stands there and waits, as the father of the lost son waited, rather He does not stand and wait, he goes forth to seek, as the shepherd sought the lost sheep, as the woman sought the lost coin. He goes--yet no, he has gone, but infinitely farther than any shepherd or any woman, He went, in sooth, the infinitely long way from being God to becoming man, and that way He went in search of sinners.” (from
Training in Christianity)
Richard Linklater
Before Sunrise (1995)
Waking Life (2001)
Before Sunset (2004)
George MacDonald
“In what belongs to the deeper meanings of nature and her mediation between us and God, the appearances of nature are the truths of nature, far deeper than any scientific discoveries in and concerning them. The show of things is that for which God cares most, for their show is the face of far deeper things than they; we see in them, in a distant way, as in a glass darkly, the face of the unseen. It is through their show, not through their analysis, that we enter into their deepest truths. What they say to the childlike soul is the truest thing to be gathered of them.” (from
The Voice of Job)
Emily Dickinson
The Bustle in a House
The Morning after Death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted opon Earth –
The Sweeping up the Heart
And putting Love away
We shall not want to use again
Until Eternity
John Steinbeck
“In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror.” (from
East of Eden)
Bob Dylan
He woke up, the room was bare
He didn't see her anywhere.
He told himself he didn't care,
pushed the window open wide,
Felt an emptiness inside
to which he just could not relate
Brought on by a simple twist of fate.
(from “Simple Twist of Fate”)
Walker Percy
“What is the malaise? You ask. The malaise is the pain of loss. The world is lost to you, the world and the people in it, and there remains only you and the world and you no more able to be in the world than Banquo’s ghost.” (from
The Moviegoer)
Sofia Coppola
Virgin Suicides (2000)
Lost in Translation (2003)
Marie Antoinette (2006)
Kathleen Norris
“Church is to be participated in and not consumed. The point is not what one gets out of it, but the worship of God; the service takes place both because of and despite the needs, strengths, and frailties of the people present. How else could it be?” (from
Dakota)
Marilynne Robinson
“Whenever I think of Edward, I think of playing catch in a hot street and that wonderful weariness of the arms. I think of leaping after a high throw and that wonderful collaboration of the whole body with itself and that wonderful certainty and amazement when you know the glove is just where it should be. Oh, I will miss the world!” (from
Gilead)
N.T. Wright
“Preaching the gospel means announcing Jesus as Lord of the world; and, unless we are prepared to contradict ourselves with every breath we take, we cannot make that announcement without seeking to bring that lordship to bear over every aspect of the world.” (from
What Saint Paul Really Said).
David Bazan
It's weird to think of all the things
That have not been keeping up with the times
It's ten o' clock the sun is down
Just begun to set the western hills on fire
I hear that you don't change
How do you expect to keep up with the trends
You won't survive the information age
Unless you plan to change the truth to accommodate the brilliance of man
The brilliance of man
(from “Letter From a Concerned Follower”)
G.K. Chesterton
“Gazing at some detail like a bird or a cloud, we can all ignore its awful blue background; we can neglect the sky; and precisely because it bears down upon us with an annihilating force it is felt as nothing. A thing of this kind can only be an impression and a rather subtle impression; but to me it is a very strong impression made by pagan literature and religion. I repeat that in our special sacramental sense there is, of course, the absence of the presence of God. But there is in a very real sense the presence of the absence of God. We feel it in the unfathomable sadness of pagan poetry; for I doubt if there was ever in all the marvelous manhood of antiquity a man who was happy as St. Francis was happy.” (from
The Everlasting Man)
Gus Van Sant
Elephant (2003)
Paranoid Park (2008)
Solomon
"I have seen the task which God has given the sons of men with which to occupy themselves. He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also set eternity in their heart, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end. I know that there is nothing better for them than to rejoice and to do good in one's lifetime; moreover, that every man who eats and drinks sees good in all his labor--it is the gift of God. I know that everything God does will remain forever; there is nothing to add to it and there is nothing to take from it, for God has so worked that men should fear Him. That which is has been already and that which will be has already been, for God seeks what has passed by." (Ecclesiastes 3:10-15).
Jack Kerouac
“What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?—it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.” (from
On the Road)
St. Augustine
"Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee..."
Martin Luther
“Unless I am convinced by proofs from Scriptures or by plain and clear reasons and arguments, I can and will not retract, for it is neither safe nor wise to do anything against conscience. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen."
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
The Son (2002)
The Child (2005)
Here’s the deal. I think it’s becoming hip to dis Facebook, and not without reason. I hope it’s OK for me to push back a little bit?
I have a similar love/hate relationship with Facebook. But it’s not neccessarily for the same reasons you mention. I found myself wasting time (imagine!) playing games, looking at every photo that got posted, poking my nose into everyone’s wall posts. My confession is more a form of voyeurism than narcissism.
At the same time, I have connected with nieces, nephews, and old classmates in ways that WOULD NOT happen without Facebook. I feel no guilt about that. Sitting down to write 25 or 50 handwritten letters, including prints of family photos, is just not going to happen.
As for my friends that I see weekly in community — it’s a mixed bag. In many ways I feel like this has been an excellent “supplement” to the relationships we’ve worked hard to form. And, yes, even those “25 Things” notes were great — kind of like a digital small group icebreaker. I’ve even observed the healthy elements of accountability, confession, and forgiveness as a result of those silly things.
I guess the point I’m trying to make is that the application doesn’t create the maturity in self-assessment or community. If we’re expecting that then we should bag the whole thing. And, how is that different from any tool ever used for community in the history of man? Is narcissism really so new? These are amoral methods that become positive or negative used in the hands of people. People who are choosing to grow up or stay babies in the faith. People who are choosing to pay attention to a Creator or to ignore Him.
Certainly, we need to think about what we are doing, to call each other up toward maturity. I commend you for initiating discussion through your post.
You should link it on Facebook. : )
This is funny, because I have been a Facebook user, abuser, and maker-fun-of since college.
I’ve been up and down. Sometimes with an account. Sometimes not.
Facebook has been like a High School girlfriend to me. On again, off again. Sometime serious, sometimes a fling.
I guess I’d be pleased (and disappointed) if it went away.
Interesting article, and I agree with the idea that things like “25 Things” can turn us into total narcissists. However, I don’t think it’ll go away anytime soon. People sent silly e-mails around in 1998, but e-mail didn’t die because it had a practical purpose outside of that.
And Facebook is practical in so many ways. I plan events with it, I use it instead of e-mail because I find it more convenient, and I can even use it instead of AIM if I ever choose to chat online. If you use Google Analytics, check to see how I found this article…yup! Through Facebook. I’ve been linked up with so many interesting things on the Web because of it.
Social networks are here to stay. Whether they can make money…now THAT’s the real issue.
For me, it’s not social networking websites themselves that bother me. Most of my dad’s side of the family is on Facebook, and since we live far away from each other it’s a great to keep in touch. However, there is a danger if living one’s entire life online. Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace become the only way we connect with others. It’s like that scene from Wall-E when the two people are talking to each other through the computer screen, and they’re sitting right next to each other!
Of course while I’m typing this, I should be working, so I can’t really say much.
I have a yes-and-no feeling about this. On the one hand, I don’t really have any relationships with people that I’ve “met” through Facebook or other online networks. I agree that those kinds of relationships would be mostly pen pal kinds of things at best — no real shared experiences, no face-to-face interactions, etc.
On the other hand, I started out on Facebook in order to better keep in touch with the students in my campus ministry, and it worked very well for that. They’ve graduated and I’ve moved on, so those relationships are attenuating — they’re gathering a little electronic dust, if you like. I’ll probably unhook from a lot of them during this year.
And now, I’m re-connecting with people from different times in my past with whom I have already shared those similar experiences and the rest. A lot are high school classmates who are on Facebook to make sure they can keep an eye on their kids, but we’ve started stumbling over each other and enjoying learning about the lives we’ve been living since our last reunion. For example, for a lot of us, our “25 Things” were fun reminders of some past times and some neat insights into what made us the people we are today instead of the people we were back then. The Time writer can gripe all she wants that this meme “is so stupid,” but maybe she should have more interesting friends ;-)
I think you’re right on in that anyone who sees an internet-created relationship as an end in itself will wind up mired in the superficial. But when it’s an introduction to or a continuation of a real flesh-and-blood relationship, then Facebook, et. al. can be useful tools.
I think both are possible and one does not necessarily preclude the other. Both can support and encourage growth in the real relationship. I’m so grateful to have reconnected with friends from all over the continent that I would have otherwise. And now, since I know where they are and what they’re up to, when I’m in their area, I can facebook message them and say, “Let’s get together!” If it weren’t for facebook, I’d come and go and never hang out with them. When I use facebook as a supplement to real relationship, I think it’s fine. When it becomes a replacement, then we have a problem.
i agree with you brett, facebook will destroy how the next generation looks at and communicates with other people. we have already lost so much with email and the telephone- look at teenage girls who spend hours texting on the phones rather than actually having a conversation with those around them. If facebook is the downturn to our society, we should go even a step further and blame TV. and movies- so really this problem has been around since we started inventing and producing media.
facebook has just become another one of our functional saviors as a society. we have lost how to listen, enjoy the quiet of silence in conversation and the lost art of letter writing. Our problem is that has been around since the Eve ate the apple and Adam did not kill the snake. We long to save ourselves or find something to save us but since we are mostly narcissistic creatures really we just want to save ourselves.
If it didn’t kill email, why will it kill Facebook?
“Whatever happened to that wonderfully unsteady sense of mystery, that awkward flubbing around in relationships that used to characterize “getting to know” someone?”
Seriously…I honestly regret many of the things I’ve learned about people from the Internet and wish I could “unknow” some of them. It’s just not nearly as cool to find out you have something in common with someone on Facebook as it is to have a conversation about it.
I killed my blog this week because of that…
I have been reading your blog for a few weeks, but this is my first comment. I felt it appropriate to comment on this subject since your blog was suggested to me by a friend with whom I recently reconnected on Facebook.
I agree with Brett T that Facebook provides a way for someone like myself, who has lived in almost ten cities in my lifetime, to catch up and reconnect with friends who had become “long lost”. There would be no way to know the mundane details of my friends lives who live in FL, GA, TN, CA, Afghanistan, Scotland, etc. if it weren’t for Facebook. I like knowing what my friends are reading, watching, and thinking about. I like seeing their creativity, joy, frustration, and opinions in a brief status update. There is no way I could keep in touch with as many friends spread across the globe as I do with Facebook if all I had were letter writing and the telephone.
However, Facebook is taking an ugly turn. What started as a way for college students — who lived in close proximity to each other — to network with each other, naturally evolved into a way for alumni to stay connected. Facebook, at its heart, is a way to network and stay connected. But lately, with the rise of the “survey” (kicked into motion by the 25 Facts craze), Facebook is in danger of becoming yet another narcissistic poster board of self promotion.
I’m not quite ready to give up on Facebook yet. While I agree with many of the potential dangers you listed, I feel compelled to point out that I, for one, don’t use Facebook to “get to know” people I’m not close to in the first place. Example: My extended family members and I are very close, and the advent of Facebook has given me and my cousins (who live in various cities across the country) a way to connect and “hang out” in a way that may never have been available to us otherwise.
The points you make in this post certainly apply to the people who use Facebook as an escape from reality and a way to omnipotently control their interactions with others, but I think something still needs to be said for the connection that Facebook provides among people who already know and love each other in real life but who can’t always be together.
We disagree then. I like Facebook and find it rather useful. I like to maintain a network with people, and wish Facebook existed 10 years ago, would have been easier than trying to keep everyone’s contact information up to date. It’s nice, too, to get comments from people I used to know well back in college and other times.
I ended up doing “25 random things” after being tagged for awhile, and sure, it’s not the same as a conversation, but it ended up being fun, and one could argue that a lot of things are pointless. It hardly ‘captured my imagination’ though.
There are many people that argue blogging is narcissistic, and leaving a comment, whether here or on Facebook, could be labeled a waste of time. Do I know you because of what you choose to share here? Not really, but I know something.
I do feel, however, that we need to interact more with each other in person, in ways that we truly get to know one another. It’s far different to be emotionally vulnerable in person than online, and not nearly the same. Technology can be a useful supplement, but it’s a sad replacement for real relationships.
Indeed – the move toward using digital mediums as windows through which we interact is weird… probably wrong, and definitely gives a cheaper sense of the person. However, this is just another cog in the wheel – another mix between anonymous information and pornographic techno-identity. According to Comscore over one billion people use the internet around the world and nearly 1 in 5 of them using facebook – and the fastest growing segment is 30+ with 70% of users overseas… it’s becoming global and its not moving in the direction of the simpler but the more complex…
Meaningless yes – but lucrative, evolutionary, and most importantly natural for the younger…
It wont matter if its facebook or its replacement – social networks and their data connected through mobile devices around the world will drive lifestyle, our sense of truth, and the economy for the rest of your life… Indeed you may be fighting this battle your whole life…
Most important is that we develop a language or ontology with which we can model and express substantive truth within such a world. Those who reject the world in whole may be less effective a infusing truth than the critical eye within.
Facebook for me has been a jumping off place for real life relationships. I have many fruitful relationships in real life, both friendships and networking type relationships that were originally nurtured on Facebook. Its not that I meet people via Facebook, its that Facebook helps to get over the road blocks that stand in the way of keeping up with these sorts of relationships. For example, I am an introvert and it can be difficult to work through the small talk stage of a relationship. Facebook has helped me to do that. As silly as it sounds, knowing some small conversation starting piece of information gathered from Facebook gives me a great jumping off point with people in real life. Also, as a full time stay at home parent, Facebook gives me the opportunity to network and stay current with people who are in the field that I wish to enter upon finishing my time at home with my children. I simply can’t, at this point in my life, show up to many of the events that people go to to keep up with their career field, but when I am able, I have a jumping off place with people because of the relationships that I have built with people on Facebook. I love that when my kids are in bed and I’m stuck at home for their sake that I can still enter into a chat on Facebook that keeps me connected. In my experience this has enhanced my real life relationships rather than taken something from them.
I do agree that facebook often reflects our own narcissicm, but I also think it is very useful for people who move a lot (like myself). My parents live on the sub continent, my siblings are all over the us, and my dearest friends are in England, Australia, Seattle, Portland, Spokane, and Chicago.
It would be wrong to allow facebook “relationships” to take me away from present friendships in my current home, but it is immensely valuable for keeping up with loved ones around the world, and for that I count it a great blessing!
Just discovered your blog – beginning with the Christian hipster series (was mildly disappointed not to really find myself among the twelve, but also mildly relieved) – and I love the bits about irony (I’ve been railing against irony lately, including in myself)… anyway, related to this post, I recently wrote this at the beginning of a Facebook hiatus: “I think I become more myself – which can be scary: I don’t have other people’s clever verbal habits as close to hand, I don’t have the reminders of people’s personal lives, of topics that might interest them, as close to hand either. Facebook can be a kind of buffer against personal weaknesses in relationships, I think. It is good for me to be forced to write letters or email, if I want to talk.” But I also have a love/hate relationship with it. Example: is it good that when I’m desperately lonely I can post ten updates in a day? Or would it be better if I just learned to deal with loneliness? Many dilemmas…
Thanks though,
I also feel that the death of facebook seems imminent, it’s just like the death of many hypes before the dotbomb.
bob Julius Onggo
Facebook will die and there are three letters you need to know to believe that statement: AOL. For years many thought that America Online was necessary to view the internet. So much so that it stayed far longer than it should have. However, when sheeple finally realised that you don’t need a middle-man to view the internet, it eventually became a ghost of its former self. Now it’s nothing more than a website. A cheap knock-off of Yahoo!’s website, at that. Wow…talk about hitting rock-bottom.
The novelty of Facebook will be replaced with something that doesn’t take as long to complete and has a shinier interface. It really is that simple. As a web programmer I know that Facebook is nothing more than a place for people who don’t know how to build web sites, or even simple pages for that matter. And that’s fine. That can be fixed easily without having some college dropout making a few billion.
But when large companies feel they are missing out on business because they lack a Facebook presence, I take issue. Mainly because of two reasons. 1) It isn’t true. This myth is perpetuated from the idea that when someone searches on Google, sometimes the company’s Facebook page will show before the company’s actual website. This brings me to number 2) Facebook as part of a business model is idiotic. The only thing Facebook does for companies is steal traffic from them. If viewer A goes to the Facebook page of a company to get some quick information then leaves, the incentive to go to the company’s actual page is lost. Which means they don’t get the page view. A few missed views is one thing. But if you are a large company, those missed opportunities add up. It REALLY becomes a problem if you’re trying to tell your marketing and sales departments that it’s worth the client’s money to advertise with them. Those clients want large numbers. And if Facebook is stealing those numbers from you, it’s time for Facebunk to go.
These points are what is going to kill Facebook. If you tell this to ten others, we could kill this thing ourselves.