“The patron saints of the counterculture idea are, of course, the Beats, whose frenzied style and merry alienation still maintain a powerful grip on the American imagination. Even forty years after the publication of On the Road, the works of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs remain the sine qua non of dissidence, the model for aspiring …
Inerrancy Too Weak
In the past I have criticized the inerrantist position (as popularly conceived) as being too weak. And in dealing with the assumption that theological conservatives somehow want the Bible to be their foundation for certainty about universals, thus making me a “foundationalist,” which I hotly deny, I find that I still have to explain how …
Christ the Foundation
I suppose that if believing in Jesus Christ as the cornerstone makes one a foundationalist, then I am a foundationalist. But otherwise not. Andrew Sandlin wants to describe an aspect of the contemporary conflict this way. “Today’s battle between us Christian postmodernists on the one hand and some Christian foundationalists on the other is at …
Revolution Through Consumption
“What we thought was really eerie, though, was the way mass culture reflected the high critics’ priorities. While they spoke proudly of their own subversiveness and turned out account after account of the liberating potential of each act of consuming, the culture industry itself grabbed with both hands at the golden promise of rebellion-through-consumption. The …
Adjectives Don’t Exist
“Abstractions like truth, beauty, and green are necessary in order for us to communicate at all. But we must be careful here because our entire problem rests in what we have thought we are allowed to do with abstractions. The lack of ‘existence’ is true of all adjectives, including those adjectives we call numbers. One, …
Modernism and Plato
“But Western culture needed more time in the detox center than was actually spent there, and the temptation to go back to realist assumptions has been constant and unrelenting. This has been particularly the case with mathematics and its cousins — theoretical physics and symbolic logic in particular. Many modern fads and fashions — the …
Honky Tonk Piccolo
“Far more is involved in learning how to do this than just making a list of words that can be used — whether never, occasionally, or all the time. Someone who has a generally pietistic cast of mind cannot just throw a word in here or there — that would be like trying to play …
Ten Reasons For Not Taking Postmodernism Seriously
1. Postmodernists take themselves seriously enough already. 2. It might make some sense to speak of the “post-colonial” era if a hundred years or two have gone by since the era in question has assumed room temperature. But until then, you can’t really see it, and ought not pretend as though you can. For all …
Ezra Nehemiah 4
Introduction The task that the returning exiles had was that of rebuilding in the midst of ruin. The work was overwhelming and the challenges huge, and we are very much in a similar position. As we have noted, one of our basic tasks is that of learning from them. The Text: “And when the seventh …
Hip Off the Rack
“The sixties are more than merely the homeland of hip, they are a commercial template for our times, a historical prototype for the construction of cultural machines that transform alienation and despair into consent. Co-option is something much more complex than the struggle back and forth between capital and youth revolution; it’s also something larger …