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 […]
I recently gave a talk to Cardiff University’s Staff and Postgraduate Christian Fellowship (SPGCF) on Christianity and Postmodernism. I’m now going to adapt that talk into a series of blog posts, to go up over the next couple of weeks. Many Christians think Postmodernism = relativism = bad! Titles such as The Truth Wars, The […]
The modern person is in the grip of a new psychological consciousness – one that is extremely pre-occupied with the self. We have become a culture of Narcissism. So says Andrew Fellows in his paper “The Culture of Narcissism“, which can be downloaded from the L’Abri website. He also has a series of four lectures […]
Here are a few thoughts on how university is going. Initially, this was going to be in an email, but I thought it’s the kind of general interest thing suitable for my blog, and putting it here saves me saying basically the same thing several times, and also gives me an excuse to point people […]