Morsels for thought. . .

     During [our] lifetime, architects had largely championed sterility, which is order bled of purpose, and celebrated power, which is meaning stripped of grace.  By rejecting the fundamentals of the very civilization that made possible its rise, modernism and its philosophical stepchildren offered flash in place of genuine beauty, sensation in place of hope.



     All of humanity's follies seemed worth embracing if that were the price to preserve everything beautiful in human civilization.  Although the human heart is selfish and arrogant, so many struggle against their selfishness and learn humility; because of them, as long as there is life, there is hope that beauty lost can be rediscovered, that what has been reviled can be redeemed.



Both quotes, like unexpected gems found along a winding path, from Dean Koontz, The Taking.  

Dissing Our Ancestors

I always find it curious when people use "Bronze Age" as some kind of put-down, usually directly more or less obliquely at the Judeo-Christian worldview, and attempting to deliver some kind of blow to it by implying that anything and everything that came out of the Bronze Age would necessarily be of inferior value to anything that we have in our more supposedly enlightened era.  Human beings have created two substances that, for all practical purposes, are permanent (will be around until the sun subsumes the Earth):  bronze, and plastic.  The Bronze Agers left us breathtaking sculpture, useful tools, beautiful adornments, and yes, weapons. 

What are we Plastic Agers leaving the future?  Garbage.  Tons and tons and tons and tons of garbage, made of one of the two most permanent substances ever devised by humans, taking over the land, the seas, threatening to subsume the Earth before its time.  Which age seems wiser?  Things that make you go "hmmmm". . . .

Somebody else musing about the use of a previous historical era as a put-down, and proposing one of his own:

its-so-enlightenment.html

Good movies do NOT exclude good messages.

In fact, quite the opposite.  All* of the movies in this list are either good or actually GREAT movies:


https://www.commonsensemedia.org/blog/7-movie-dads-so-great-youll-wish-they-were-yours?utm_source=061214+Parent+Default&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weekly



*There's one I haven't seen yet, so that one's going on my queue immediately; but given the quality of the rest of the list, I'm betting it's at least a good movie, as well as providing a picture of a good dad.