In some of my recent posts, I’ve been looking at the ideas of various postmodern thinkers – Lyotard, Foucault and Barthes – arguing that there’s more common ground than you might at first suspect between the Christianity and postmodernism. I’m now going to consider the challenges and opportunities in general terms. Postmodernism vs postmodernityOf course, […]
Continuing my series on Christianity and Postmodernism: Another famous idea associated with postmodernism is “The Death of the Author”, announced by Roland Barthes in his famous essay of that title, published in 1968. Barthes attacks the idea that the meaning of a text is fixed by the author’s intentions. In particular, he takes issue with […]
Six years ago, a young, innocent and fresh-faced boy found himself suddenly transplanted from the wilds of deepest, darkest Wales to the seething cosmopolitan mass that is Cardiff (well, that’s how it seemed at the time, anyway). Once his parents drove away, he was alone in the city, not yet knowing anyone or anywhere, left […]
It’s over three years since I graduated from Cardiff University in English Literature & History, and I’m about to go back for more. On Tuesday, I picked up my student card, and so I’m officially a postgraduate student. Tomorrow, I’ll be enrolling with the School of English, Communication and Philosophy for a MA in English […]
The Pope’s visit is imminent, and on cue, The Guardian has more than its usual quotient of articles bashing religion and waving the flag for secularism. Polly Toynbee has a particularly entertaining specimen, Sex and death lie at the poisoned heart of religion. Here’s the opening paragraph: A dispute with BBC TV’s religious slot, Sunday […]
Continuing my series on Christianity and Postmodernism: French philosopher Jacques Derrida, is famous, or infamous, for his technique of “Deconstruction”. He made the provocative claim in his book Of Grammatology that “There is nothing outside the text”. By this, he didn’t mean that the things around us – people and trees and knives and forks […]
A month or so ago, I had the pleasure of attending the Christian Postgraduate Conference in Dovedale, Derbyshire, at which Edith Reitsma from L’Abri Fellowship England and Alister McGrath, writer of many books including The Dawkins Delusion, were speaking. I’m starting my masters in September, but might as well get started early in thinking about […]
In 1979, philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote The Postmodern Condition (introduction, first five chapters). He was the one who popularised the term “postmodern”. In his introduction, he said: Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. What is a metanarrative? The simple answer is that “metanarrative” means “Big Story”. Since Christianity tells a […]
So what is postmodernism, then? It’s a bit hard to pin down, since it refers to a broad range of ideas, many of which call into question traditional notions of language and communication. In some ways, it’s not so much a defined philosophy as an anti-philosophy, a way of questioning established systems of thought. So […]
To kick off my discussion of Christianity & Postmodernism, I’d like to begin in what’s arguably quite a postmodern way – not with explanations, arguments or definitions, but by pointing you to a story – my story, telling about some of my spiritual and intellectual struggles as an undergraduate student, which I first published on […]
