(on fox news).... it's like watching a Disney movie about the news.

Each story on televised news is “breaking” until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean.

Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-Thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.

My sister's the type who religiously watches the fear segments of her local Eyewitness News broadcasts, retaining nothing but the headline...Everything is dangerous all of the time, and if it's not yet been pulled off the shelves, then it's certainly under investigation — so there.

"Of course, in television's presentation of the "news of the day," we may see the Now...this" mode of discourse in it's boldest and most embarrassing form. For there, we are presented not only with fragmented news but news without context, without consequences, without value, and therefore without essential seriousness; that is to say, news as pure entertainment.

Revelation when applied to religion, means something communicated
immediately from God to man. It is revelation to the first person
only, and hearsay to every other, and, consequently, they are not obliged
to believe it. It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation
that comes to us at second hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation
is necessarily limited to the first communication.

The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.

I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed.

If you travel long enough, every story becomes a novel.

Dépêche-toi, soleil, si tu es curieux des nouvelles que cette nuit te dira demain

Every book is a journey, a map into the complexities of the human mind and soul.

The Self-revealing of the Word is in every dimension — above, in creation; below, in the Incarnation; in the depth, in Hades; in the breadth, throughout the world. All things have been filled with the knowledge of God.

War is like night, she said. It covers everything.

The truth is, the only way we can navigate the complexity of reality is through some sort of abstraction. When we read the news, we’re consuming abstractions created by other people. The authors consumed vast amounts of information, reflected upon it, and drew some abstractions and conclusions that they share with us. But something is lost in the process. We can lose the specific and relevant details that were distilled into an abstraction. And, because we often consume these abstractions as gospel, without having done the hard mental work ourselves, it’s tricky to see when the map no longer agrees with the territory. We inadvertently forget that the map is not reality.