“During most of the twentieth century, threats to campus free speech and academic freedom came mostly from the right, and from outside institutions of higher learning. The new attacks on free thought that arose in the late 1980s turned this pattern on its head: they have arisen from leftist sources inside the ivory tower” (Donald …
Scratch and Sniff Multiculturalism
“What multiculturalism in the curriculum assuredly does not mean is a renewed emphasis upon the mastery of foreign languages or the close study of complex civilizations . . . the campaign to impose ‘multiculturalism’ amounts to nothing less than a war on Western civilization and, beyond it, a war on the very idea of civilization” …
Retained and Put On Steroids
“The autonomy of the individual that the Enlightenment championed has, in the postmodern spirituality, been retained, but also radicalized.” [David Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), p. 115]
Salt and Light
“Parents us this [the salt and light argument] as a reason, but they acknowledge the need for preparation to be salt and light in other settings. Who sends their kids to Vacation Bible Schools run by Mormons in order that they might be salt and light? Who sends their eight-year-old to India to be a …
High Capitalism
“It is quite striking, then, to note the parallels between postmodern habits of mind and the realities which have come to mark our highly formed capitalism: volatility, obsolescence, the rapid passing of fashions and ideas, the disappearance of stability, constant innovation, constant revision, repackaging, the new look, the newer than new product, the future always …
No Standby Lord
“We do not understand that our academic slide has occurred because it had to. We cannot reject the tree and continue to demand the fruit. The universe coheres because Christ is Lord — and there is no alternative center, no other arche on standy in case He fails” (The Case for Classical Christian Education, pp. …
Circling the Drain
“What greatly complicates the quest of those who are attempting to walk a more constructive path which is also postmodern, however, is the fact that in the aftermath of the Enlightenment, there is a gravitational pull toward the death of all worldviews. Not every postmodern thinker moves consistently in these directions but every postmodern thinker …
The Temples Still Standing
“In the ancient pagan world, belief in the gods usually died long before a willingness to dispense with the forms of worship. It is the same here. We no longer believe in the gods of education, but our commitment to their temples is still religious and deep” (The Case for Classical Christian Education, p. 54).
But Not Even Rorty Can Explain the “Left Behind” Movie
“Intellectuals like Foucault and Derrida are undoubtedly contributors to postmodern thinking, but what is often left unexplained is how we get from Foucault to MTV, from Derrida to the centerless young people whose canopy of meaning in life has collapsed, from Fish and Rorty to our movies.” [David Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs (Grand Rapids, …
But They Both Have the Same Kind of Hammer
“If two men were building a house together, but they both held tightly to differing sets of blueprints, it would not be to the point to say that they still had much in common. They both own hammers, saws, nails, carpenter’s belts, and so on, and let us say that both of them were of …