The modernist Bible is a format of the Bible that was created in the modern period. All of the additions we’ve made to the Bible and the way we’ve laid out the text is a modernist phenomenon. Before that the Scriptures were not mass-produced—the printing and mass producing of the Bible coincided with this new format of the Bible, but it wasn’t until the 16th century that chapters and verses came together into a single Bible.

The Geneva Bible brought them together, and sadly made every single verse number a separate paragraph in two columns on the page, which effectively obliterated any literary aspect of the text at all. Suddenly what the Bible looked like was a list of numbered spiritual statements, each of them individually paragraphed, and the message visually was these are meant to be read alone and understood alone and out of context. 

The contention in my book is that this new modern format, which we then added cross-reference systems, which were first developed in the same period—section headings, footnotes—all this additional material created the Bible that was really a modern reference book rather than a reading book. In fact, our practices have followed the new form.

 . . .

There was no such thing as proof texting before the appearance of the format of the modern Bible. Before that you just don’t see the practices in the church. Nobody produced a list of supposed biblical doctrines and then backed them up with a list of proof texts. That way of using the Bible was born when the format of the Bible became something that was conducive to that. It tells people that the Bible is a certain kind of thing, and it can be used a certain kind of way. 

When you change the form of something, you change what people perceive the content is. Instead of seeing a letter, a song, a story, a proverb, a prophecy, what you see is a numbered list of statements. It all looks the same. You’re inclined to not pay attention to literary genre because they just look like a list of propositions. It harms our apprehension of the Bible in very specific ways when we change the way the Bible looks.

 Glenn Paauw in "Reformat the Bible: An Interview with Glenn Pauw"

Society itself is becoming increasingly disordered even as we in effect consume our children. As our middle class disappears, those children who do survive until birth are either palmed off to the state, then to drugs, technology, and further dependency, or put onto “the path to success” at the hands of various facilitating professionals who coddle them in a stress-filled manner creating sky-high suicide rates and the pathetically fragile creatures who inhabit elite institutions of education. This is a society suffering from a veritable death wish, as those with the responsibility for raising responsible adults either eschew children altogether or abandon them to others while they pursue their own vision of personal success, treating spouses and children as mere accoutrements, consumer items made more precious by emotional attachments that, alas, are rooted in precious little practical experience at shaping lives and characters together.

. . . 

Many public policies contributed to the downfall of the traditional family and its moral core of child rearing. From the nationalization and exponential expansion of social security and other welfare programs to the so-called professionalization of all kinds of local public services, the drive for uniform fairness and security has stamped out much of family and community’s reason for being. But the essential problem goes deeper, for it is spiritual. A healthy, vibrant society requires citizens who see themselves as parts of things that are larger than themselves, in which they must play important, though rarely central roles. This means that families, churches, voluntary associations, and states are part of a way of life. They are aspects of our nature as social beings. 

Bruce Fohnen, "The West's War on Children"

Our current cultural narratives are increasingly focused on independence, pragmatism, and autonomy. We have submitted to a machinistic, technologically-driven mode of life in which we tacitly accept the materialist viewpoint of physical reality positing that only what can be observed, measured, and controlled is of worth. If something is not useful, fast, or easily accessible, we call it useless. We are busy, distracted, obsessed with activity and entertainment, eyes fixed on screens instead of faces. We are increasingly isolated from the people around us, and what little imagination we do have is dependent on whatever flickers across our screens.

The cultural narratives on which we are thus dependent have as their ideal the independent self, an ideal that unravels our connection to family, community, children, and even our place in the earth. The stories we increasingly tell are of those of personal autonomy and increasing utility, ones in which we throw off ‘the ties that bind’. We have embraced the narrative of the autonomous self and its rights, imagining in vivid films and satisfying novels the scenarios in which we throw off the shackles of family, tradition, and duty in favor of self-fulfillment. Self-discovery. Self-expression enabled by the boundless, impersonal world of technology. Self in total freedom from other totally free selves, none of us protesting any action of another unless it threatens something we desire.

 Sarah Clarkson, "Planned Parenthood: A Failure of Imagination"

Prufrock and The Sacred Wood already help us to understand the paradox of T. S. Eliot—that our greatest literary modernist should also be our greatest modern conservative. The man who overthrew the nineteenth century in literature and inaugurated the age of free verse, alienation, and experiment was also the man who, in 1928, was to describe himself as “classical in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion.” This seeming paradox contains a clue to Eliot’s greatness as a social and political thinker. For Eliot recognized that it is precisely in modern conditions—conditions of fragmentation, heresy, and unbelief—that the conservative project acquires its sense. Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this fact lies the secret of its success. What distinguishes Burke from the French revolutionaries is not his attachment to things past, but rather his desire to live fully in the concrete present, to understand the present in all its imperfections, and to accept the present as the only reality that is offered to us. Like Burke, Eliot recognized the distinction between a backward-looking nostalgia, which is but another form of modern sentimentality, and a genuine tradition, which grants us the courage and the vision with which to live in the modern world.

Roger Scruton, "T. S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor" 

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman has an excellent critique of the data-driven mindset of Enlightenment Modernism, which looks to quantitative research alone to solve all of society's problems. (As an educator, I see this problem in education, which is dominated by standardized testing.) Quantitative research is just one way to discover/regulate/define truth among many, but modern society sees it as virtually infallible. Postman calls out this bias:

We have [many prejudices today], as for example, the equation we moderns make of truth and quantification. In this prejudice, we come astonishingly close to the mystical beliefs of Pythagoras and his followers, who attempted to submit all of life to the sovereignty of numbers. Many of our psychologists, sociologists, economists, and other latter-day cabalists will have numbers to tell them the truth or they will have nothing. Can you imagine, for example, a modern economist articulating truths about our standard of living today by reciting a poem? Or by telling what happened to him during a late-night walk through East St. Louis? Or by offering a series of proverbs and parables, beginning with the saying about a rich man, a camel, and the eye of a needle? The first would be regarded as irrelevant, the second merely anecdotal, the last childish. Yet these forms of language are certainly capable of expressing truths about economic relationships, as well as any other relationships, and indeed have been employed by various peoples. But to the modern mind, resonating with different media-metaphors, the truth in economics is believed to be best discovered and expressed in numbers. Perhaps it is. I will not argue the point. I mean only to call attention to the fact that there is a certain measure of arbitrariness in the forms that truth-telling may take. We must remember that Galileo merely said that the language of nature is written in mathematics. He did not say everything is. And even the truth about nature need not be expressed in mathematics. For most of human history, the language of nature has been the language of myth and ritual. These forms, one might add, had the virtues of leaving nature unthreatened and of encouraging the belief that human beings are part of it. It hardly befits a people who stand ready to blow up the planet to praise themselves too vigorously for having found the true way to talk about nature.

The whole aim of an intellectual life ... is to behold the truth, and to love it for its beauty.

It’s hard to keep that foremost in mind, when we are met at every turn with a barrage of ugliness: expensive, deliberate, programmatic ugliness, such as that of the prose from the Alaska standards for reading and writing; and when the eyes of the soul are washed in the carbolic acid of relativism; and when truth is reduced to what is demonstrable by means of some measurement; and when reason is but a clever tool for procuring what will sate the appetite.

. . .

You do not read good books so that you can scramble up some tricks, so that you can write clever things about them, so that you can do well on a test and secure a prestigious job and then die. You learn about the language and about what writers do, so that you can read good books and learn to love them, because they are companions who will tell you what they have seen of the truth, and they tell you it in a way you will not soon forget.

Anthony Esolen, "Read Literature to Learn and Love the Truth"

[Uwe] Kliemt and his allies believe that musicians began playing faster at the dawn of the industrial era. As the world sped up, they sped up with it. In the early nineteenth century, the public fell in love with a new generation of virtuoso pianists, among them the supremely gifted Franz Liszt, who played with dazzling dexterity. For the virtuoso, cranking up the tempo was one way to flaunt his technical brilliance--and give the audience a thrill.

Advances in instrument technology may have also encouraged faster playing. In the nineteenth century, the piano came to the fore. It was more powerful and better suited to running notes together than were its predecessors, the harpsichord and the clavichord. In 1878, Brahms wrote that "on the piano . . . everything happens faster, much livelier, and lighter in tempo."

Mirroring the modern obsession with efficiency, musical teaching took on an industrial ethic. Students began practicing by playing notes, rather than compositions. A long-hours culture took hold. Modern piano students can spend six to eight hours a day . . . Chopin recommended no more than three.

In Kliemt's view, all of these trends helped to fuel the acceleration of classical music. "Think of the greatest composers in the pre-twentieth-century canon--Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Brahms," he says. "We play them all too fast."

Carl Honore, In Praise of Slowness, pp. 232-33

Maybe the problem is that not everyone knows the world is getting better. Maybe we should tell the growing ranks of schoolchildren smoking marijuana that there’s no need to check out, because things are great. Maybe suicide wouldn’t be the third-highest cause of death in American teens and early twenty-somethings if only someone told them how much progress the human race has made. 

Things have never been better in the realm of the measurable. But the human soul has no gauge. It has no quantity and so no self-respecting scholar will come near it. This world is better than it has ever been, so long as we forget that we have souls, and hearts that beat despite being broken. 

This is not a brief against progress. I have the luxury of this lament because I do not have to spend all my hours scratching out subsistence. I am only trying to say that something has gone missing. We aren’t measuring wrong things, it’s just that we’ve forgotten what is immeasurable. And if we cannot remember this part of humanity, we will turn every good thing against ourselves.

Tony Woodlief, "Past Where Legs Can Carry"