In my defense, I love the book in a postmodern kind of way where I’ve always sensed that it contains something that I relate to. I think it’s the kind of book that echoes my...

I realize then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy...

shall I spend much of your time pointing out the degree to which televisual values influence the contemporary mood of jaded weltschmerz, self-mocking materialism, blank indifference, and the delusion that cynicism and naïveté are mutually...

Women’s liberation is one thing, but the permeation of anti-male sentiment in post-modern popular culture – from our mocking sitcom plots to degrading commercial story lines – stands testament to the ignorance of society. Fair...

We all – whether naturalists, atheists, Buddhists, or Christians – see the world through the grid of an interpretive framework – and ultimately this interpretive framework is religious in nature, even if not allied with...

What was true of an ancient community of Christian believers struggling with a powerful and appealing philosophy is also true for Christians in a postmodern context. Arguments that deconstruct the regimes of truth at work...

For some folks death is release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I’m there for all of them.

The common-sense notion that ‘There is a time and place for everything’ gets carried into a set of prescriptions which replicate the social order by assigning social meanings to spaces and times.

Whereas modern cynicism brought despair about the ability of the human species to realize laudable ideals, postmodern cynicism doesn’t — not because it’s optimistic, but because it can’t take ideals seriously in the first place....

The question of the relation between modernity and postmodernity revolves around the issue of ‘legitimation.’ Modernity, then, appeals to science to legitimate its claim – and by ‘science’ we simply mean the notion of a...

This is not the “relativism of truth” presented by journalistic takes on postmodernism. Rather, the ironist’s cage is a state of irony by way of powerlessness and inactivity: In a world where terrorism makes cultural...

Is there a word for forgetting the name of someone when you want to introduce them to someone else at the same time you realize you’ve forgotten the name of the person you’re introducing them...

I perceive that it is far more practical to begin at the beginning and discuss theories. I see that the men who killed each other about the orthodoxy of the Homoousion were far more sensible...

In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, ‘life’ is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We...

Obi-Wan Kenobi once said ‘your eyes can deceive you, don’t trust them.’ It seems to be getting harder. Distinguishing reality from the illusions people make for us, or the ones we make for ourselves. I...

Our physical world seems ready and able to accommodate the needs of the spiritually awakened new Superhuman. The constraints or demands of our material world are not the real problem; it is our own spiritual...

Quick note here: if this crush-slash-swooning stuff is hard for you to stomach; if you’ve never had a similar experience, then you should come to grips with the fact that you’ve got a TV dinner...

It is assumed that the skeptic has no bias; whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of skepticism.

Doesn’t that mean that you do believe there is some kind of moral reality that is “there” that is not defined by us, that must be abided by regardless of what a person feels or...

…is postmodernity the pastime of an old man who scrounges in the garbage-heap of finality looking for leftovers, who brandishes unconsciousnesses, lapses, limits, confines, goulags, parataxes, non-senses, or paradoxes, and who turns this into the...

As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.

I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.

I think your belief structure is childish,” does not amount to persecution. Insensitivity is not the same as harassment or oppression.

For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct...

Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods’ conscience; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding the mirror.”I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might...

Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when...

outdated social constructs,” and while that is partially true, the social construct stance becomes clear reductionism when it totally discounts clear differences in male and female biology (i.e., androgyny is not the same as equality).

For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction’s seriousness by dating it out of the...

So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?

You’re chicken, she told herself, snapping her seat belt. This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl.

Even at a time like this, the street is bright enough and filled with people coming and going—people with places to go and people with no place to go; people with a purpose and people...

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going...

The Postmodernists’ tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.

And I wasn’t playing a role – I was trying to be myself.But the harder I was striving, the more I was realizing that I had probably lost that ‘myself’ somewhere between two perfectly performed...

To him, they looked like shadows that his wife had left behind. Size 7 shadows of his wife hung there in long rows, layer upon layer, as if someone had gathered and hung up samples...

It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.”[MovieMaker Magazine #53 – Winter, January 22, 2004 ]

I had not particularly liked the way in which he wrote about literature in Beginnings, and I was always on my guard if not outright hostile when any tincture of ‘deconstruction’ or ‘postmodernism’ was applied...

Even I don’t know myself… In fact, I don’t know if I really have a self at all, as I’m constantly playing different roles and pretending – not so much on stage as in real...

This is the postmodern desert inhabited by people who are, in effect, consuming themselves in the form of images and abstractions through which their desires, sense of identity, and memories are replicated and then sold...

Isn’t post-modernism really one big cover-up for the failure of the French to write a truly interesting novel ever since a sports car ate Albert Camus?

So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away–and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man.

In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant.

We are living in a time when sensitivities are at the surface, often vented with cutting words. Philosophically, you can believe anything so as you do not claim it a better way. Religiously, you can...

All discourses and disciplines proceed from commitments and beliefs that are ultimately religious in nature. No scientific discourse (whether natural science or social science) simply discloses to us the facts of reality to which theology...

The religionists are the enemies of liberty, and the friends of liberty attack religion; the high-minded and the noble advocate bondage, and the meanest and most servile preach independence; honest and enlightened citizens are opposed...

The radical hermeneutic of suspicion that characterizes all of post-modernity is essentially nihilistic, denying the very possibility of creative or healing love. In the cross and resurrection of Jesus we find the answer: the God...

All U.S. irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I say.” So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That...

We’re the most aggressively inarticulate generation to come along since, you know, a long time ago!

Worship, then, needs to be characterized by hospitality; it needs to be inviting. But at the same time, it should be inviting seekers into the church and its unique story and language. Worship should be...