Fri 6 Oct 2006
ahhh…free wifi….Thank you, Jesus.
Moby: culturally postmodern artist.
*you can be swimming in the water of postmodernity and still reject some major tenets of pm-ism.
Download his interview at sojo.net
Postmodern tendency to take the old/ancient and synthesize it with the new.
*what can we absolutely know for sure? ….how did we get here?
Theology does not stand on it’s own. You understand God in relationship to how you understand lots of other things.
4-6 BC (The Ancient World)
Aristotle
Plato
Paul
Plotinus
Augustine –hardcore dualism (mind and spirit are good; body and flesh are bad)BIG problems for Augustine: if God is Good, how could Jesus come in a physical form, ob. The body is bad..?) He literally invented the word ‘tri-unitas’, i.e. trinity.
Church Fathers
The Dark Ages (AD 500)
-obviously no great thinkers…
Ancient-Modern Transition (AD1000)
Aquinas
Scholastics
Modern Period (AD 1500)
Descartes-wanted to prove the existience of human beings, so he spent over a year in solitude, thinking and doubting…at the end, he realized he could doubt everything, except the simple fact that he was doubting. He came up with ‘cogito ergo sum’. Gave birth to reductionism and eventually the reformation.
Luther
Calvin
Copernicus/Galileo
Modern-Postmodern Transition (AD2000)
Nietzche
Jacque Derrida
Foucault
Baudrillard
*the real promise of the Elightenment was that we would shed the biggies that divide us, i.e. religion, nation borders, one world money systems and languages and metric system.
In the face of Globalization, 3 things are happening:
One, people are becoming more religious instead of more secularized.
Two, Also on the rise is fundamentalism and ethnocentrism.
Three, Postmodernism emerges and provides an understanding of who I am (as an orthodox Christian) but also understand those who are not, and are aware of the Imago Dei (we are made in the image of God). A very christocentric gospel. There exists a dialetctical tension…without resolution of that tension.
Jacques Derrida—like most PM philosophers, is European, jewish, and (I think) gay.
Most known for the phrase ‘deconstruction’, to break out of something into new meanings.
4 Responses to “ PostModernism 101: Almost Everything You Wanted To Know ”
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October 6th, 2006 at 5:55 pm
Again begging the question is PM actually just Pre Socratic redux?
October 6th, 2006 at 11:32 pm
No.
I was tempted to leave it there, but I won’t. The whole medieval and modern package cannot be unexperienced. Nor would anyone really want it to be. But that means we cannot truly return to any ancient style of thought even if that were desirable. (And frankly, I’ve studied the ancient mind and culture enough to seriously question its desirability.) Postmodernity is the inevitable reaction to the arrogant and overarching claims of modernity, but it offers no real hope and is not in and of itself a culture capable of sustaining society. I would call it transitional, but the question of destination is very much open.
Of course, I wasn’t at the conference, so I have no clue if that was Tony Jones’ perspective. But it is mine. Of course, since postmodernism is by nature highly fluid and (I believe) transitional, you aren’t going to find any single phrase or thought that describes it. You have to approach it tangentially and recognize that anything you say will be incomplete.
October 6th, 2006 at 11:45 pm
Think of Moby (the electronica/dj/music artist)–he spends countless hours digging through old records, actually vinyl, 33rpm LPs…the old petroleum-based albums we had as kids. He takes them and records them into his digital studio and loops technology into them. That’s PMism.
Or, as Len Sweet says, it’s like a swing on a child’s playground: we/they instinctively do two opposing things simultaneously–lean backwards and kick into the future. That’s PMism.
(of course, I’ve used images to convey ideas…another PM tendency..)
October 6th, 2006 at 11:59 pm
And thus the PM tendency to fall flat on your butt…