The “Malady” of Modesty

“The moral hedges that surrounded our collective life have been trampled down. That is the paramount truth. What once was sublimated is now, in all of its raw and often violent nature, spewed forth in the name of liberty or self-expression. What once had to be private is now paraded publicly for the gallery of …

Culture As Cop

“Culture, then, is the outward discipline in which inherited meanings and morality, beliefs and ways of behaving are preserved . . . It is what tells us what owning a Cadillac means, what significance being gay has, how we can measure someone whom we learn is a doctor, an engineer, a street artist, or homeless. …

How the Center Gave Way

“The collapse of the Western mind after Kant then scattered the human enterprise of understanding to the four winds. The falcon, moving in ever wider circles on the winds of modernity, has lost the voice of the falconer, the whole process greatly accelerated by the growing accumulations of knowledge in all fields that are stored …

The Great Bluff

“I am using the term secularism, then, to refer to the values of the modern age, especially where these lead to the restructuring of thought and life to accommodate the absence or irrelevance of God. Secularization is the process that creates the public environment in which these values seem natural and inevitable” [David Wells, No …

No Matter How Thin You Slice It

One of the standard responses to postmodernism is to point out the self-contradictory nature of it all. Incredulity to the naive belief that truth can be ascertained through words is an incredulity that reached us all via words. And when ordinary people point this out (har, har), the response is usually an urbane and sophisticated …

Come Again?

“In literature, a whole generation of deconstructionists has emerged within the universities who, despite their calling to be the custodians of the nation’s language, now make their living by denying that words have any meaning at all.” [David Wells, No Place for Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993), p. 65.]