the church and postmodern culture: conversation

Digital Detox: Practice your own Embodiment

Review of Raschke's Globochrist @ Books & Culture

Christopher Benson has just published a new review of Carl Raschke's GloboChrist at Books & Culture  online, "The Messenger is the Message":

We roam the global village as Alice roamed the chessboard in Through the Looking-Glass: pawns bewildered at every turn. The word "postmodernism" appears backwards, like the poem "Jabberwocky." Even when we hold it up to a mirror, the concept remains slippery. Alice responds to the poem in the same way we respond to postmodernism: "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don't exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that's clear, at any rate." Modernity, we surmise, was killed, and its murderers are still fugitives.

Carl Raschke is our Humpty Dumpty, perspicaciously interpreting the "postmodern moment" in GloboChrist, the third volume in Baker Academic's series, The Church and Postmodern Culture. Whereas the first two books in the series, James K. A. Smith's Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? and John D. Caputo's What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, offered textual exegesis of postmodern thinkers to correct stubborn misunderstandings and to show resonance with the Christian tradition, Raschke's book offers cultural exegesis to clarify the church's missional task in a global age. An early explorer of the intersection between Continental philosophy and theology, author of The Next Reformation: Why Evangelicals Must Embrace Postmodernity, Raschke serves as chair of religious studies at the University of Denver.

While too many Christians are tiresomely proclaiming that they are pro- or anti-postmodernism, crudely defining the heterogeneous concept, Raschke steps out of the impasse by announcing what should be obvious: "a dramatic global metamorphosis." Instead of wrangling over the "uncounted usages and syntactical peculiarities" of a word, he rightly claims: "Becoming postmodern means that we all, whether we like it or not, are now going global, which is what that obscure first-century sect leader from Palestine truly had in mind."

This book is directed to American evangelicals with the purpose of awakening them to "a pivot in world history that seems as unprecedented as the transformation of Caesar's realm during the first three centuries of the common era. That change came through the strange and distinctly un-Roman cult from Palestine centering on the crucifixion and resurrection of a mysterious nobody now known to history as Jesus of Nazareth."

Political scientists, cultural critics, economists, and sociologists have their own theories to account for today's change. Censuring the timidity of Western élites, Raschke asserts that the change agent is—hold your breath—Christ, who has been "subtly shaping and directing human history towards its consummation through the ages." After the Cold War, Raschke reminds us, futurists envisioned a "new neoliberal millennium" where peace, free markets, and technological progress would occasion worldwide democracy and prosperity. Unexamined ethnocentrism resulted in the prediction that Westernization would entail secularization. Today Francis Fukuyama and Thomas Friedman are eating humble pie. The world is not flat, but it is becoming anti-Western and post-secular. Raschke commends the dissenting foresight of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who spoke about a "return of religion," and American political scientist Samuel Huntington, who posited the famous thesis about "the clash of civilizations." They helped reveal the "fraudulent utopianism" in the West.

Continue reading the rest of Benson, "The Messenger is the Message" at Books & Culture online.

Smith @ Hope: On Two Postmodernisms

Just FYI for those in west Michigan, I'll be giving at talk next week at the Hope College Philosophy Department.  This will be an informal lecture meant to be accessible to undergraduates.  Here's the info:

Continental Philosophy of Religion: Mapping Two Postmodernisms
James K.A. Smith
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
4pm, Maas Conference Room

Abstract:

Over the past decade we have seen the emergence of "continental philosophy of religion" as a growing conversation in North American philosophy. Often associated with "postmodernism," this field considers faith and religion by drawing on the resources of French and German philosophy as articulated in figures such as Heidegger, Gadamer, Derrida, Foucault, and others. And these conversations have begun to "trickle down" into practice in, for example, conversations associated with the "emerging" church. In this talk, we'll provide a map of how postmodern sources provide a helpful lens for thinking about faith. We'll also critically consider two options or schools of thought: the "deconstructive" school of John D. Caputo and an alternative, "incarnational" model associated with Radical Orthodoxy.

So Long Battlestar Galactica...

"According to sources in the White House, President Barack Obama has been uncharacteristically distant and withdrawn ever since last month's two-hour series finale of Battlestar Galactica."

I totally feel the same way.  While I still loosely follow Lost and have a guilty pleasure in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (which just keeps getting better), I just find myself listless and distracted without BSG. 

Once Firefly was canceled (which still remains unrivaled in my opinion) I thought there would never be redemption for televised science fiction.  I thought I was condemned to watching Andromeda or Stargate forever.  I thought that I would eternally dwell in a universe created by Gene Roddenberry.

For me, BSG was the antithesis of Star Trek: Next Generation.  All the Star Treks were really just a liberal, multi-cutlural fantasy giving us an image of what we aspired to be as a society without calling us out everything that hindered us.  Not to be too crass, but it was basically cold war propaganda which then shifted into celebrating inclusion and tolerance.  As someone said, Star Trek was a symbol of what we hoped to be while BSG expressed what we really are: all messed up and barely hanging on.  For the most part BSG unflinchingly dealt with the tragic aspect of humanity, that we are simultaneously cylons and humans, uh, I mean sinners and saints.

I was out at dinner and I started talking with a friend whom I hadn't seen in a while.  He mentioned that he'd heard I like BSG. We could have talked all night, as I could here.  But I will end with this: I hope and pray that churches could function, well, but that is the wrong word, that churches could exist like BSG, describing the world as it really is and in that process opening it up to something more.  Let us not as churches project a fantasy that soothes our consciences, but rather to boldly go where no few churches have gone before: the place where we deal with our actual humanity.

Conference: "Ancient Wisdom, Anglican Futures: An Emerging Conversation"

Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, PA will be hosting what looks like a fantastic conference, June 4-6, 2009, entitled "Ancient Wisdom, Anglican Futures: An Emerging Conversation."  Our own Jason Clark will be one of the speakers, along with Holly Rankin Zaher, D. Stephen Long, Sam Wells, Simon Chan, and others.  Here's further info from the conference website:

How do we receive and pass on the Anglican inheritance in a way that moves us "further upand further in" (a phrase from C.S. Lewis) to a deep understanding of living the Great Tradition"?

This enormous question is multi-directional. How do Anglican "insiders" welcome young
evangelicals, post-evangelicals, and emergents who are attracted to the "Great Tradition"? How do inquiring "outsiders" perceive or participate in the distinctive anamnesia (memory) of Anglican worship and mission? How can the exchange between insiders and outsiders bear fruit in Anglicanism today? How will this emerging conversation stir the mind and heart of an Anglicanism in renewal?

These questions require a "baptized imagination" (another Lewis expression) set free within a collaborative gathering that gently crosses boundaries between theology, theory and praxis. We will focus the conversation on the worship life and mission of Anglicanism:·

• Living the Great Tradition
• Worshiping in the Great Tradition
• Mission in the Great Tradition

Be a part of our conversation at the intersection of theology and practice, worship and mission, where theologians and practitioners converge.

Discussion Leaders

• Jason Clark is on the co-ordinating group of Emergent-UK and with his wife, Bev, is a copastor of Vineyard Church, Sutton, Surrey, UK.
• David Neff is editor-in-chief of Christianity Today
• Holly Rankin Zaher is part of the Emergent Village Coordinating Group and is Director of Student Discipleship at St. George's Episcopal Church, Nashville, TN.

Teachers

• Simon Chan, Professor of Systematic Theology at Trinity Theological College, Singapore, is author of Liturgical Theology: The Church as Worshiping Community
• Tony Clark is Chaplain at Lee Abbey Community (UK) and teaches ethics and philosophy at Friends University.
• Edith M. Humphrey, is Professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.
• D. Stephen Long, Professor of Systematic Theology, Marquette University, is author of Theology and Culture: A Guide to the Discussion.
• George Sumner is Principal of Wycliffe College, Toronto and author of The First and Last: The Claim of Jesus Christ and the Claims of Other Religious Traditions.
• Andrew Walker, Professor of Theology and Education at King's College, London is co-author of Living Orthodoxy in the Modern World.
• Samuel Wells is the Dean of Duke University Chapel and Research Professor of Christian Ethics at Duke Divinity School
• Daniel H. Williams teaches patristics and historical theology at Baylor University and is author of Evangelicals and Tradition.

Find out more, and register for the conference.