I’ve been looking over some of my notes from when I read Paul Hiebert’s Transforming Worldviews. It’s an excellent book about culture and how it affects our outreach to the world. Might be a bit academic if you don’t spend a lot of time with the subject, but an amazing work overall. Hiebert was a pioneer in the field of missionary anthropology; in fact, you could argue that before him there was no such field of study.

One concept that jumped out at me this week was the idea that literate societies emphasize sight over the other senses while other cultures almost universally favor hearing. Because of this, literate societies have trouble believing in what they can’t see, much more trouble than non-literate societies have.

Not an earth-shattering idea, I guess, but it made me think. I have to feel that this is one big reason the modern world has trouble accepting the claims of the Bible.