Postmodernism on the Web 

 

Postmodernism is well represented on the Internet.  Yahoo and Google provide excellent starting points: Postmodernism and Postmodernism, resp.  

'Pomo' mainly bills itself as a deconstructive method of criticizing art and literature.  I have yet to see its deconstructive tools applied to modern cosmology.  There have been occasions where it has critiqued individual scientific disciplines from the perspective of their alleged cultural relativism.  The notorious Sokal hoax (q.v.) was supposed to have been a cultural critique of quantum gravity theory.  

To put it succinctly, postmodernism provides only a retail method of cultural criticism.  To mount a wholesale critique it would need to venture its own worldview, something which is constitutionally proscribed to it.  The last such was mounted by Karl Marx.  

Of some relevance to our purposes is the sectarian response to postmodernism.  A Google search on 'christian & postmodern' yields a mixed bag.  On the superficial side are various responses to the latest in pop culture.  On the more serious side is a nostalgia for the simple bipolarity of religion and science that marked modernity.  The fear is that the postmodern anti-foundational fragmentation of truth is already facilitating the further fragmentation of the Christian evangel.  There is the awareness that postmodernism is a game being played by a staunchly secular intelligentsia, whose take on religion vs. science is a curse on both establishments.  

A thoughtful assessment of the sectarian dilemma may be found in Beyond Foundationalism....  In this article Grenz claims that the history of philosophy and theology rationally entails an eschatological coherentism, a view with which I can hardly argue.  I notice that his writing is featured by the mainstream evangelical InterVarsity Press.  The immaterialist metaphysic behind such a view remains implicit.  He simply does not foresee the earth shaking paradigm shift that I do.  

But on the note of this positive finding, let us move along to the next web topic, leaving a more detailed examination of postmodernism for later. 

 

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7/11/02