It’s a debate that’s been going on for a long time: can we really trust the Bible – every word? And if it contains any mistakes, can we believe any of it at all? I’ve written a brief article discussing this over on Threads titled The Danger of Pick’n’mixianity but there’s a lot more that could be said. It’s […]
At the moment, Evangelical Alliance Wales are consulting Christians on a wide number of issues to put together a “Manifesto for Wales”, a positive Christian vision for society. This is a great idea – Christian political engagement is often very reactive, simply trying to stem the tide on the secularisation of our society, rather than […]
Over the summer, I signed up for early access to Pottermore, the new Harry Potter website, and a few weeks ago I got the email granting me beta access. One of the activities on the site is completing a quiz in order for the Sorting Hat to put you into one of the four houses […]
I’ve been rather busy with my MA course over the last couple of months, but here are at last is the index to all the posts in my series on Christianity and Postmodernism. I hope to return to a more regular blogging schedule now that my essays have been written! Introduction My story What is […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]