How strange the views of "scholars"

There is a world - I do not say a world in which all scholars live but one at any rate into which all of them sometimes stray, and which some of them seem permanently to inhabit - which is not the world in which I live. In my world, if The Times and The Telegraph both tell one story in somewhat different terms, nobody concludes that one of them must have copied the other, nor that the variations in the story have some esoteric significance. But in that world of which I am speaking this would be taken for granted. There, no story is ever derived from facts but always from somebody else's version of the same story. ... In my world, almost every book, except some of those produced by Government departments, is written by one author. In that world almost every book is produced by a committee, and some of them by a whole series of committees. In my world, if I read that Mr Churchill, in 1935, said that Europe was heading for a disastrous war, I applaud his foresight. In that world no prophecy, however vaguely worded, is ever made except after the event. In my world we say, 'The first world-war took place in 1914-1918.' In that world they say, 'The world-war narrative took shape in the third decade of the twentieth century.' In my world men and women live for a considerable time - seventy, eighty, even a hundred years - and they are equipped with a thing called memory. In that world (it would appear) they come into being, write a book, and forthwith perish, all in a flash, and it is noted of them with astonishment that they 'preserve traces of primitive tradition' about things which happened well within their own adult lifetime.

- A. H. N. Green-Armytage, John Who Saw, 1952, p. 12f (cited in JAT Robinson, Redating the NT, p.356)

Can pursuing personal satisfaction lead to human flourishing?

I would probably say that the most significant challenge that we face today—a challenge with which many other significant issues are connected, such as poverty, ecological degradation, runaway technological developments, et cetera—is the notion that human flourishing consists in experientially satisfying life. Put differently, one of our main challenges is that we live in a culture of the managed pursuit of pleasures, not of the sustained pursuit of the common good. To me, that is one of the fundamental issues of the day. My horror-image, so to speak, of where we might go as a culture is what I have called in one place, the Hiltonization of culture—Paris Hilton as a paradigm of what culture becomes.
...
More abstractly, by Hiltonization of culture I mean [that] kind of fleeting life of self-interest and the pursuit of pleasure. This seems to me to be the main malaise of contemporary society, which of course is led by very powerful cultural currents and institutional arrangements. So I think one of the key issues for us is to think anew about the nature and character of human flourishing within the context of larger creation. So the project in which I am involved right now is entitled “God and Human Flourishing.” What is the relationship between our overarching interpretation of life and our account of human flourishing? For Christians, that means what is the relationship between who God is and how God is related to creation and what it means for us to flourish?

- Miroslav Volf

Thoroughgoing materialism

"I say that inner beauty doesn't exist. That's something that unpretty women invented to justify themselves." 

- Osmel Sousa, the longtime head of the Miss Venezuela pageant on the popularity of plastic surgery in Venezuela (NY Times Quotation of the Day, 7 Nov 2013)

My thoughts:

This is materialism in its most honest and consistent form: the only things that are real are those that we can see and touch and manipulate.  Somehow I don't think this leads to human flourishing.