“The public sphere, dominated as it is by the omnipresence of bureaucracy, systems of manufacturing, the machinery of capitalism, and the audible confetti spewing out of countless radios and television makes it virtually impossible to think that in this world God has any meaningful place. He may have a place somewhere, but not here, not …
Postmodernity: Modernity’s Hiccup
“I have spoken of the emergence of the global cliché culture as the birthmark of Our Time. Until modernity was ushered into our world, cultures were always local. They were, by definition, sets of meanings and morals, beliefs and habits that arose in specific contexts of history and religion, a people’s social organization and place …
Convenience Store Therapy
“Television entertainments tend to avoid problems that can’t be solved by the end of the hour.” [David Wells, No Place for Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993), p. 200.]
The Power of the Cultural Vacuum
“What is now in place is not exactly an alternative system of belief. What is in place is no system of belief at all. It is more like a vacuum into the quiet emptiness of which the self is reaching for meaning – and finding only itself. But this is to put the matter more …
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 …
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.]
Poster Boy
“It is, in fact, this assumption of an ability to move from one plateau of achievement to another that has given us a need always to be post: we feel compelled to assure ourselves that we are post-Puritan, post-Christian, and post-modern. Our world is post-industrial and post-business. Our time is post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, and post-Cold War.” …