the church and postmodern culture

We Are Still Them: Non-Denominationalism and the Hermeneutics of Silence

By: J. Aaron Simmons – Department of Philosophy – Furman University – aaron.simmons@furman.edu  I. I was raised in the American evangelical subculture and have recently been part of several different non-denominational, generally evangelical, (mega)churches in the American South.  As a result of these experiences, I have become increasing concerned about the... Read More

All Things Shining: Maps on Fire

Mythologies (macro-scale meaning-maps) are a byproduct of religion in the same way that stories are a byproduct of life. This is fine. But our stories are not alive and our maps are not the way. It’s a mistake, I think, to think that religions are in the business of making meaning. Religions make meaning the way donut shops make donut holes: as leftovers. The trouble with... Read More

Hunger and Love – The “Logic of Late Capitalism” Unwinds into the Postmodern Apocalypse

It’s another gray and misty morning here in the second district of Vienna.  The church bells toll to invite the sleepy-eyed revelers from the night before to churches that, except for Christmas tourists, will probably remain mostly empty. The second district is historically the Jewish district of Vienna, where Freud lived and hung out.  For some unfathomable reason Freud is... Read More

Love By Any Means Possible (and The Postmodern Condition of Desire)

“Love is something like a theater of the world but with only two people in the audience,” -Alain Badiou, “What is love, sexuality and desire?,”[i]   In 1909, E.M. Forester wrote the “The Machine Stops.” He described a future world where people live privately in rooms and interact with one another via screens connected to one unifying machine. People only relate... Read More

Criminal Minds: Secular Rationality and State Worship

The following is a guest post by Jonathan McGregor. Jonathan is a Ph.D. student in English and American Literature and American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, MO. His research interests include 20th century and contemporary American fiction, modernity and postmodernity, secularity and postsecularity, religious epistemology, and political theology. His favorite... Read More

Being Relevant: Confronting the latest sacred

  by Rachel K. Ward The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned. Its sole message is: “What appears is good; what is good appears.” Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 1968 Relevance is the exact opposite of countercultural, the unintended consequences are significant. Gabe Lyons, The Next Christians, 2010 In the contemporary... Read More

The Liturgical Turn: Toward a Theology of Birth / An Advent Meditation

Joseph.  I’ve always found him extremely fascinating.  I guess that’s partly due to the fact that we’re told so little about him.  We know he was incredibly obedient to God.  He was present for Mary’s pregnancy, Jesus’ birth and childhood, but once Jesus grows up, he’s strangely absent.  The traditional reason is that he simply passed away. ... Read More

Towards a New Missional Mapping?

Jason Clark will be presenting this recent digest of missional theology later in November at 'Seek the Welfare of the City'. We thought that it would be helpful for you all to engage it here.  Is there any pointing mapping the missional church? Is there a future for Evangelicalism? Let us know. Towards a New Missional Mapping?  Read More

Reflections on the Summer of 2010, by Daniel A. Siedell

Reflections on the Summer of 2010 Daniel A. Siedell Classes start next week.  As I hustle to put together course syllabi for the fall semester my work this summer has forced me to reconsider the contours of my academic vocation.  We academics live in bubble.  We live in a world in which seminar rooms, the lecture hall, faculty meetings, academic conferences, and "close... Read More

Specters of Rage in an Age of Change – Sloterdijk and the “End” of the Postmodern

Multiple Specters Perhaps we can adapt just one more time Marx's well-known and overadapted opening to The Communist Manifesto that a "specter is stalking" us. It was this same "specter" that Derrida back in the mid-1980s adapted in Specters of Marx to rejuvenate what by then was his already aging project of deconstruction to produce first the "political",... Read More