I was blessed to hear Pastor Allen cite one of my favorite books in his sermon last Sunday. Amusing Oursleves to Death was first published in 1985, but is just as relevant today as it was when it first appeared. I am on my third reading myself. I've listed of few favorite quotations below, in hopes of enticing some other Dove Mountaineers into reading it. It will provoke, challenge, simulate, and even amuse you....but not to death!
In reference to the Second Commandment: "It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture." p. 9, emphasis in the original.
On the tyranny of the urgent: "...with the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events." p. 11
On media as epistemology: "...we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities, but by what it claims is significant." p. 16
In defense of classical rhetoric: "To disdain rhetorical rules, to speak one's thoughts in a random mnner, without proper emphasis or appropriate passion, was considered demeaning to the audience's intelligence and suggestive of falsehood." p. 22
On the significance of print media: "Most of our modern ideas about the uses of the intellect were formed by the printed word, as were our ideas about education, knowledge, truth, and information." p. 29
On the Founding Fathers: "As Richard Hofstadter reminds us, America was founded by intellectuals, a rare occurrence in the history of modern nations. 'The Founding Fathers,' he writes, 'were sages, scientists, men of broad cultivation, many of them apt in classical learning, who used their wide reading in history, politics, and law to solve the exigent problems of their time.'"
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