“Lewis and Clark didn’t return from their trip and say, ‘Well, we didn’t find the Northwest Passage, but we did find ourselves.’ But that is the spirit of Bobo travel. Our travel dollars are investments in our own human capital. We don’t just want to see famous sights; we want to pierce into other cultures. …
A Situated Idahoan
In his fifth chapter, Grenz introduces us to the forerunner of postmodernism, to the voice crying in the wilderness — Fredrich Nietzsche. The philosophers of modernity (who bookended that age when rationalistic charismata were still being given to men) were Descartes and Kant (p. 84), and this gives us the approximate dates of 1650 to …
Ah, Texture
“But to demonstrate their superiority to such people, the educated elites prefer to build environments full of natural irregularities. For the Bobos, roughness connotes authenticity and virtue. So the educated elites love texture . . . Really rich Bobos will hire squads of workmen with ball-peen hammers to pound some rustic wear into their broad …
Simple Rhythms of Life
“The educated class has conquered all and hegemonized its Bobo culture over affluent regions from coast to coast. Now the Babbitt lion can mingle with the beatnik lamb at a Pottery Barn, a Smith & Hawken, a Museum Shop, a Restoration Hardware, a Nature Company, a Starbucks, or any of the other zeitgeist-heavy institutions that …
Kant Saves the Day
In his next chapter (4), Grenz does a good job summarizing the views of the modernists, against whose goads the postmodernists have been kicking. He says, “if we are to understand the postmodern agenda, we must look at the rise of the modern mentality to which contemporary thinkers are so vehemently responding” (p. 57). We …
And the Jaws of the Papist Trap Snap Shut
Well, the truth is finally out. You can read it here.
Father Hunger
One of our local critics has gone into print again, reiterating his story, to which he is sticking, that we are somehow “calling for the execution of homosexuals.” Which he says is “just plain ugly.” This canard has been answered more than once, but I want to do it yet again, just for the record. …
Culture Pouts
“Avant-gardism, money, status, Le Chic, and even the 1960s idea of sexiness – it all buzzed around Pop Art. The place, without any question, was Leo Castelli’s gallery at 4 East Seventy-seventh Street. Castelli had Johns, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, most of the heavies. It was there that the Culture buds now hung …
Bohemian Lockstep
“It was all sheer rhetoric, of course, the antibourgeois sing-along of bohemia, standard since the 1840s, as natural as breathing by now and quite marvelously devoid of any rational content . . .” [Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word (New York, Bantam Books, 1975), p. 48.]
More on Driscoll and McLaren
There is more here on the confrontation of Brian McLaren by Mark Driscoll. These are not trivial issues, and we should not think that this is just about one article by McLaren that was perhaps thoughtlessly written. All the foundations for this collapse on homosexuality are clear in his books. He who says A will …