Let me begin with an outrageous conclusion, and then try to defend it. This is not usually a good procedure because it just gets everybody’s back up, but if the outrageous conclusion is actually the voice of sweet reason, then why not? Here is the conclusion, in a short series of statments. The only genuine …
The Real Me
All human knowledge is embodied knowledge. Discrete monads of “knowledge” do not sit in our brains like so many marbles in a can. We are creatures fashioned from the dust of the ground, and this means that God has created us to know with our bodies. This prevents us from taking refuge in that old …
Living in Story
One more comment on modernity’s whipping boy, Constantine. One of the central problems with many pomos is that they write turgid philosophy in praise of narrative, but they don’t understand story, and the same goes for their frothy popularizers. As a result, they are the ideal audience for hair-raising melodramatic cliff-hangers. Constantine is converted and …
Police Forces of Modernity
One more comment on Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? The problem with “robust and confessional dogmatism” in a postmodern world is this. There are only a limited number of options here, and all of them but one are variations of what Leithart identifies as “Christianity.” As he uses the word in his book Against Christianity, Christianity …
In Praise of Leithart
In my first pass on James K.A. Smith’s Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?, I recognized that he did not want to give way to the full-throttled relativism of postmodernism. He said some promising things early in the book, but, as I mentioned, by the end it was clear that his approach was not going to cut …
Catching a Blunder
My thanks to Prosthesis, who caught a significant blunder in my review of Smith’s book on postmodernism below. I quoted Smith summarizing Foucault, and then interacted with that as though it were Smith himself. Mea maxima blunda, and I have corrected the problem. My apologies to all my readers, and particular apologies to Smith for …
Pretending To Leave Modernity Behind
Just finished Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? by James K.A. Smith. In some ways this was a very helpful book, but at the center, the place where the door moves on the hinge, this door squeaks in as annoying and exasperating a way as all the others. The tone is set in the introduction to the …
The Surrender is Settled
In the previous post, I was (what is it we do these days? I forget) interfacing with James Smith’s book Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? This book is part of a series by Baker Academic, a series called “The Church and Postmodern Culture.” In the series preface, this is what we read: “How should concrete, in-the-pew …
What We Need Around These Parts Is A Good Dose of Van Til
I recently spent a goodish bit of time being exasperated by Richard Rorty, who doesn’t believe that we should view nature in the mirror of some glassy essence in our brains, which is fine with me, but he then spends many, many pages holding up his mirror for us to see philosophy in. But if …
Some Arguments Against Evolution
“It [evolution] gives us almost everything the imagination craves – irony, heroism, vastness, unity in multiplicity, and a tragic close. It appeals to every part of me except my reason.” C.S. Lewis Arguments against the theory of evolution can be classified into four broad categories. We may call them particular evidences concerning questions of fact …