quotations about tradition
I think there's a paradox about tradition in a pluralist society like ours. In such a society, tradition is itself a matter of individual choice; there's no avoiding it. Tradition is just one available option among many for an individual to choose; in the end, each of us is free to choose tradition or to reject it; to choose it and then reject it; or to choose some aspects of it and not others.
MARK MOVSESIAN
"The Paradox Of Tradition In The Modern World", The American Conservative, May 16, 2017
You do not understand your own tradition if you do not see it in relation to others.
JOHN SEARLE
"The Storm Over the University", The New York Review of Books, December 6, 1990
The doctrines and dogmas of ecclesiastical tradition are absolute commands and cannot be violated unless found contrary to the laws of God and the church.
POPE GREGORY XVI
attributed, Day's Collacon
The critical evaluation and selective endorsement of elements of the past and the present does not tarnish the authority of tradition. As long as no essential elements are deemed to have been erased or muted in this mediation process, the tradition, while only a semblance of what it was in the past, is vested with the authority of being equivalent to its totality in the past. Equally constitutive of the selective process of the preservation of tradition is the cultural process by which people in the present identify elements of their own necessarily localized, social realities that are consistent with the past, that cohere with the tradition, and that are made eligible for assimilation into the corpus of tradition.
ZAREENA GREWAL
Islam Is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority