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I’ve recently discovered Ihab Hassan who has written a slew of books and articles on the transition from modernity to postmodernity. One well known title is ‘The Post-modern Turn’, that I located much cheaper as an e-book.
There are many comparison charts summarising the contrasting features of modernity with postmodernity. Ihab provides a detailed and much referenced one in his work The Dismemberment of Orpheus in 1988, that you can see here.
As a shorter summary, he suggests:
Modernity – postmodernity
Purpose – Play
Design – Chance
Hierachy – Anarchy
Centering – Dispersal
Selection – CombinationThe terms of modernism are clustered around the ability to analyse, order, control etc. The terms on the posmodern side are clustered around the inability to control, of the organic and emerging.
I have seen these kinds of lists often used perjoratively, as if the modern are all bad, and postmodern are good. I’m more convinced that if we dwell on the modern side we become stifling and joyless whilst dwelling on the postmodern side we become narcisstic and superficial.
Maybe one way to reagrd these categorisations is in terms of left and right brained. The modern world has been very left brained, whilst the post-modern turn has been recovering the right brain. Wired magazine carried an article last year titled revenge of the right brain that outlines the move of the left brained world of modernity and the transition back to the right brained.
Our churches need to recover, and explore the right brained aspects of post-modernity, but must not make the same mistakes of modernity by abandoning the left brained. I keep talking about the need for a ‘deep church’, instead of a patholigcal reactionary post-church, and I supect a ‘deep church’ will recover, revive and nurture the right brained, whilst holding on and using the left brained.
Our churches need to be structured, intentional communities of programmed mission, that are simultaneously places of play, surprise and exuberant creativity. In fact I think the postmodern turn is not about a false dichotomy between these categorisations, but the opportunity to see them as synthesised and synergistically working together.
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With all the comments about my blog, with it’s current and planned changes I thought I’d post some tips on making the most of the site. Without resorting to pimping my stats, I can meaningfully say that, at least 82% of my page views are with people using a web browser, and not using RSS feeds. In other words most people visiting this site, come once a week, or less, and use a web browser with a bookmark to access my site.
The reason for moving to the current format was to help keep posts as current for as long as possible, for the majority of visitors. What used to happen was that posts quickly dissapeared of the blog and unless you read it nearly every day to missed all the previous items. So at a glance you can take in a months worth of posts.
Another reason to change was to try to have more comments and interactions, and the new layout make it easier to see current conversations and with whom, rather than just a number underneath a post.
Overall the number of visits, and comments has increased substantially since the site re-design, for which I am eternallly grateful to JD. But I’m aware that the design will suit some and not others. However here are some tips for different kinds of readers to maximise the site:
1. Email reader: If you like things being pushed to you, use the email notifications sign up in the bottom right hand corner side bar. When I make a post you will receive a copy of it directly into your email.
2. RSS Feed: Why not try a news feed reader and the RSS feed for this site, an explanation of how these work are here. I tend to read/scan the 165 blogs I have bookmarked this way. It’s much quicker and I can track any new posts at a glance.
3. Weekly Newsletter: Why not sign up for a weekly newsletter, that sends you a summary of each post for the week in an email newsletter. This might work better if you rely on reminders coming to you a few times a month showing what’s new.
4. Manual Visit: Use a book mark, or type in my address when you feel like checking up.Using one, some or all of these you should be able to get the information from the site you want, when you want it. I hope that’s some help.
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The third in the Deep Church lecture/conversation series led by Professor Andrew Walker was another great evening. Andrew has kindly reviewed these notes and made suggestions to better reflect the points he was trying to convey in his lecture. I am very grateful to Andrew for his comments but as ever any errors in the notes are mine.Conversations in this series:
1. The Spirit is Real but he is a person not a force: lessons from Pentecostal, Charismatic and Orthodox traditions. (Link to my notes).
2. Discovering the missing half of Christendom and stumbling across the Fathers of the early church.
3.Living with Ambiguity: facing up to difficulties in scripture and Christian doctrine.
4. On being a theological teacher: notes from the frontline.
5. The ecumenical vision of C S Lewis: moving towards a generous orthodoxy.
6. From certainty to hope: why I know less now than I did when I was 18.Tales of a life lived with doubt
Andrew said that he wanted to separate ambiguity as something that often caused interesting and creative theology from doubts per se. He showed us a 6th century icon of Christ [pictured, click on the image for a larger view] which was weird because the face gazing out at us was normal on one side and distorted on the other. Andrew said his favourite definition of theology was ‘faith thinking’ and that what we had before us were the efforts of early iconographers trying to catch the biblical paradox that Jesus was both God and Man. It did not work in this case because they conveyed depravity or wildness rather than the good humanity of Jesus but it was successful as showing us an example of faith thinking…
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Prompted by the previous post announcement of the Oxford Animal Ethics Centre, I thought I would post my thoughts/notes on the topic of speciesism, after I took a seminar with Revd Prof Andrew Linzey. And I can’t remember ever reading a blog post on this topic (although I’m sure there are some, let me know if you know any?)
Speciesism: Is the assumption of human superiority leading to the exploitation of animals.
Background: why is this an issue we need to examine?
We have had the arbitrary favouring of one species (humans) from others and have seen the exploitation of billions of sentient species. When it comes to sentience, we know that not just humans suffer mental pain but animals/birds also suffer the mental anticipation of pain. Animals exhibit a great deal of sentience, and we are discovering they have more every day.
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I have been pondering a post on speciesism for a few months, and this announcement today prompted me to take the plunge.
I’ll put the announcement text here, and then in a second post write some thoughts on speciesism and christianity.
————100 Academics Support New Animal Ethics Centre at Oxford
More than 100 academics from 10 countries have agreed to become Advisers to the new Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics – to be launched online on Monday (27 November) at www.oxfordanimalethics.com – which aims to put animals on the intellectual agenda.
The Centre is the world’s first academy dedicated to the enhancement of the ethical status of animals through academic publication, teaching and research. Academics world-wide from both the sciences and the humanities will be eligible to become Fellows of the Centre. It will act as an international, independent think tank for the advancement of progressive thought about animals.
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I would like to update readers on some changes that I am planning for this site in the coming months.
You may already have seen and interacted with a small team of guest posters that I have asked to be involved on the site when I am away teaching, studying or on holiday. This team has provided a variety of excellent quality material from differing perspectives and played a significant part in contributing to the aim of this site to be a safe place for diverse conversations about church. I would like to thank the team for their contribution so far.
Building a team of guest authors
In fact it has been such a successful feature of the site that I have invited additional guest authors to form an enlarged team. I have invited these people as:
Interesting relevant writers: for the most part they have blogs of their own who’s content I highly commend to you. I hope that by featuring some of their best of posts from their own blogs you will be able to get a flavour for their content and style and visit and interact with them on their sites as well as mine.
Diverse voices: The guest authors come from a variety of countries, cover a plethora of ages, interests, some are practitioners, others participators, some observers and a mix of male and female. Whilst I know you appreciate my own thoughts and style I am only valid speaking about my research, context and specific practices. By opening the site up to these guest voices I hope you will experience richer and more rewarding conversations, ideas, interactions and perspectives rather than the existing Clark monologue.
Generous conversational church: One of the values of emergent is to be a generous church and to make space for all voices, I hope that in part this will help model this value in this place. I hope as well it will encourage a community that can write well as well as interact in a generous, loving manner.
Helping me out: these folk are helping me out by giving me time to develop my own writing and keep the mix on the site that of information, links as well as more thought provoking and interactive posts.
Building community: Many of the guest authors will be familiar to you already as people who involve themselves in commenting/questioning/exploring on this site. Some of them will not be so familiar with you but nevertheless will, I think add to the vibrancy of the community that we are part of here.
I am hoping to have a couple of guest authors post each week and to bring you mini interviews with each of the team so we can find out more about them.
Including your voice?
I would like to continue to expand the number of guest authors that take part in this community and increase the number of diverse voices still further. If you would like to be considered, you’ll have some idea from the above of what I am looking for, please drop me a line or leave a comment below.
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Tobias’s post on Authenticity, got me thinking some more about what is real authenticity? Here is a great blog post by Trevin Wax that discusses authenticity, Time to Get Real about “Getting Real”.
In summary it suggests that:
a. The cry for authenticity is vital. The I’ve got it all together victorious christian living, that saw Tedd Haggard as a casuality recently must be taken apart. We need christian to be real, especially our leaders.
b. But does the pendulum swing too far, so that authenticity means revelling in our imperfections, and sins. It’s just the way I am, and stuff anyone who doesn’t like anything about me.
And too often being ‘real’ is reduced to people having to let me be me, and behave as I want to, with no challenge. Yet this is so often a superficial acceptance. At an event this year I heard someone say ‘if I could only find church that didn’t ever want me to do or be anything, I’d join it’, as if that was the mark of an authentic church. Aren’t Christians are called to spur one another on, to challenge each other to grow, to remind each other that the real us, is a fallen us, so often lost in selfishness and ego, and that the real us is found in following Jesus with others. As Trevin put’s it, “Confessing our sins and recognizing our brokenness is not optional for Christians”.
Yet we so easily swing from one to the other, and undemanding ‘be who you want to be’ with no restraints and superficiality, or a judgmental and controlling respectableness.
So what do you think ‘authenticity’ really is?
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Jörn Hjorth brought this to my attention. It is called the Inglehart Values Map, and can be found on the World Values Survey web site. For a detailed explanation of the map as it relates to different countries, see here.
The World Values Survey is ongoing having started in 1981, and surveys are extended and repeated every 10 years to map ‘waves’, of change (you can read history of the survey here). The Inglehart Map is one result of the survey. It maps two dimensions of cultural variation, (known as “traditional v. secular-rational” and “survival v. self-expression”).
The farther “south” a society is, the more traditional; the farther “north” the more secular or “rational”. The farther west a society is, the greater its concern for basic survival—food and shelter. The farther east, the greater the concern for self-expression and equal rights.
It will be interesting to see what the next wave is when it is mapped in 2011. It’s a powerful visual way to view the world, and understand differences between cultures and has implications for mission, and church, that I am only beginning to ponder/wonder about. What does it make you think of as you view it?
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I’ve written a few pieces here critiquing the current trend that everything be ‘authentic’ and most recently did so here.
Tobias Künkler posted some comments, and mentioned he had a paper in German on this topic. He has kindly gone to the effort to translate it, and text is here and pasted below. It’s short, readable, provactive and superb. I’ve asked Tobias to come back here and interact with any comments you might have and questions. Tobia has studied sociology, paedagogic and philosophy; currently he is working as an assitant in educational research at the University of Bremen and is trying to write his doctoral thesis about the meaning of others in learning processes.
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Gary Shavey at Mars Hill Church and The Resurgence, has posted his review of the Off The Map event I was involved with and that I reviewed here.
