A REQUIEM FOR POSTMODERNISM—WHITHER NOW?1
THE CERTAIN DEMISE OF THE POSTMODERN
Postmodernism is highly overrated.2 While one theologian after another is rushing to turn out books and articles about some aspect or implication concerning the end of modernism or about the implications of postmodernism, it can be plausibly argued that postmodernism is overrated and that it will come to a certain (and perhaps soon) demise—or at least will be relegated to the realm of the curious but passé.
First of all, modernism (which holds that reason is autonomous and that only scientific truth is normative and universal, and which propounds a progressive optimism and proud confidence in technological fixes), while not the only worldview, is still alive and well at the educational- and cultural-shaping institutions of Western Europe and North America. I spoke recently with two Ph.D. students at two different major Ivy League research universities in North America, and they both said that while one did certainly find postmodern thought on the campuses (particularly in English and related departments), the intellectual culture of the university was still predominantly modern.3 They frankly said that they basically ignored postmodernism.4 One has only to skim the university press catalogues to find out that modernism is alive and well. Ironically Foucault, Derrida, and other French postmodernist thinkers have been passé in France for a good while, substituted by a generation of younger scholars one can only call “neoconservatives” (who will be discussed further below).
Second, the simple reason why postmodernism’s days are numbered is that it commits epistemological suicide. Postmodernism makes the assertion that truth is merely a social construct—or as one postmodernist puts it, truth is whatever your colleagues let you say.5 If that is the case, then postmodern thought is also just another social construct and has neither universal nor normative force. Therefore, there is no reason that one should be compelled to let it be a normative criterion to shape and determine one’s beliefs. Moreover, if one takes the postmodernists’ idea of the hermeneutics of suspicion seriously, then there is every reason to believe that their whole academic exercise is simply a thinly veiled disguise to get political power over anyone who holds a view different than their own.6 Since postmodernists have shown their hand, one can easily avoid being taken in by their verbal con game. Most simply stated, postmodernism is guilty of being self-referentially absurd. When postmodernists give up the idea of objective truth, there is no reason what-soever to take what they say as true—particularly since they have conceded up front that nothing is genuinely true.
There have been several excellent critiques of postmodern thought from evangelical Christians on grounds that are philosophically solid.7 While this chapter will not add to those critiques, it commends those who have resisted reshaping theology to conform to an outside influence that is ultimately hos- tile to the very possibility of doing any genuine theology. The study of historical theology is often a study of how theology has been shaped and con-formed to alien ideologies and philosophies that have had the effect of neutering the basic content of historic orthodox Christian theology. Rather than conforming to these external demands, it is sometimes appropriate for Christian thought to challenge and contest philosophical systems that are internally confused or hostile to Christian theism. Process theology is a perfect example of a philosophy to which theology has been conformed. Here is a philosophy that rarely lives in philosophy departments, except as a relic in the history of philosophy division, since its credibility as a philosophical system has been fundamentally rejected.8 Yet it lives on as a parasite in theology departments. The same may well be the destiny for postmodern thought.
Solid work has demonstrated the deficiency of the thought of those evangelicals who are all too ready to reshape doctrine and their agenda to con-form to some of the major tenets of postmodernism.9 The fundamental error of such scholars is in making the false assumption that the evangelical schol-arly approaches they criticize have conceded too much to modernism. The great irony is that Carl F. H. Henry is often singled out as the most egregious example of an evangelical whose system is determined and undermined by modernism. Henry, in his six-volume work, God, Revelation and Authority, distinguishes himself as a severe critic of the Enlightenment’s view of the sufficiency of autonomous human reason unaided by revelation, has funda-mentally decried the naïveté of secular humanism’s progressive optimism, and would categorically deny that science is the savior.10 He also knows that human reason and the laws of logic were not an invention of the Enlightenment. When one reads certain writers on postmodernism (including some evangelicals), one would get the impression (if one did not know better) that reason, along with its dependence on the reality of objective truth and its recognition of the legitimacy of a rational defense of the faith, is the illegitimate offspring of the Enlightenment. Several have even suggested the abandonment of apologetics and the project of natural theology. While most evangelicals enamored with postmodernism say that they do not want to give up Christianity’s truth claims (or as the postmodernist would say, “Christianity’s metanarrative”), most of them also think that a rational defense of the faith is not a legitimate enterprise that deserves serious attention and effort. What the church needs, it is said, is not apologetics or the rational defense of the faith, but a loving and caring Christian community (for that is a postmodern priority).11 No doubt it is of the highest priority for the church to be a caring and loving body—but this is not postmodern (since postmodernism, via Foucault, appears to replace truth with the mere struggle for power); this is simply biblical. Moreover, one cannot avoid the fol-lowing critical question: How do we adjudicate between conflicting truth claims, religious or otherwise? Moonies or Mormons may have communities as caring as those of Christians. Then what? Like it or not, if one is going to make a truth claim for the Christian faith, reason and the testing of truth claims will play a significant role in the process.
WHITHER SHALL WE GO?
Since both modernism and postmodernism have been dealt with elsewhere in this volume, the question we shall examine is not from whence the culture has come or where it is (premodern, modern, postmodern), but whither shall it go? Paul Vitz has suggested that it is time for conferences to be given titles like “The Death of Postmodernism.” He sees indicators on the horizon of a new transition in culture that he calls the “coming transmodern period.” By transmodern, he means “something that transforms modernism, something that transcends it and moves beyond it. In doing this, it certainly does not reject all things modern, and thus it is far from a reactionary vision of the future.”12 Transmodernism would indeed constitute a rejection of both the overreaching claims of modernism and the nihilistic absurdity of postmodernism, while benefiting from the positive contributions of both. Is there evidence for “the birth of this new ideal of hope, of wisdom, of virtue and the good, of beauty and harmony, . . . the resurrection of classicism and other pre-modern concepts in the different arts and the intellectual life itself”?13
Indicators of the quiet dawning of this new vision are discernible from several segments of our culture, including music, architecture, the visual arts, poetry, literature, and the core of intellectual tradition, including philosophy and moral theory. While it is too soon to identify a movement (even as it is difficult to identify a postmodern movement), there are common characteristics and a shared vision that appears to be emerging at varied, unexpected, and non-coordinated places.
The Transmodern in Music?
In music, an alternative to John Cage’s music of irrationality and chance is appearing: a music that is informed from beyond modernistic naturalism or postmodern irrationalism. Consider two composers. American composer Terry Riley was called the greatest composer pianist since Prokofiev in his reviews at the Sergei Kuryokin Festival in St. Petersburg.14 John Adams’s works have been performed by major European orchestras and virtually every major orchestra in the United States.15 Both are minimalists with an Eastern spiritual bent. In addition to these two, there is a virtual wave of non-pop musicians who are influenced by explicit classical Trinitarian theism. This is a sign of a change in the wind. My purpose here is not to suggest that all of these developments move in the direction of truth, but rather that this is one aspect of the emerging cultural evidence that postmodernism is not the only game in town.
When a classical album rises to number six on the British charts right behind Paul McCartney (Gramophone’s “Best-selling CD in 1993”), prompts a review by Rolling Stone magazine, and is introduced into mainstream retailers like Sound Warehouse so that the CD is found on the checkout counter in Muleshoe, Texas, even the most casual cultural observer begins to notice that there’s a disturbance in the cultural environment. Such was the case at the 1992 release of Catholic and Polish composer Henryk Gorecki’s Third Symphony. Gorecki has been associated with the avantgarde wing of con-temporary classical music. The Third Symphony was composed in 1976 with the title Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.
Gorecki grew up in the Polish town of Katowice, an unknown town except for its neighbor—Oswiecim, called “Auschwitz” in German. The texts of the three movements that drive the symphony are (1) a lamentation of fifteenth-century monks; (2) a prayer by a teenager imprisoned by the Gestapo written on a wall where she tries to find the good out of her dire cir-cumstances; and (3) the demanding question of a mother who asks, “Why did you kill my son?” While the work is appropriately viewed as sorrowful, it nevertheless clings to vestiges of hope in the face of despair. Gorecki sees his art as a form of prayer and he has continued to produce significant works “carrying forth the musical, emotional and spiritual concerns with which he has been preoccupied from the beginning.”16
Many people all over the world were introduced to the works of John Tavener when his composition was featured at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. Tavener joined the Russian Orthodox communion in 1977, and his spiritual concerns have been prominent in his numerous works since then. The desire that shapes his work is to “create an icon in sound.”17 His Fall and Resurrection, which premiered in January 2000 in London at St. Paul’s, was wildly popular. In the same year he was knighted for his “Services to Music.”
Arvo Pärt is an Estonian who has incorporated Russian Orthodox spirituality into his minimalist compositions.18 It has been said, “by means of almost purely tonal structure, frequently broken triads and scales, Pärt cre-ates an inner balance of form and harmony, which can be understood in terms of his deep religious faith and inclination to mysticism.”19
Acclaimed as “the foremost composer of the Nineties,” Scottish com-poser James MacMillan’s “music is notable for its extraordinary directness, energy and emotional power. Strongly held religious beliefs (which in his own words he calls a ‘spiritual anchor’) and political beliefs coupled with com-munity concerns inform both the spirit and subject matter of his music.”20 MacMillan’s setting of the Magnificat has been performed at Wells Cathedral (and BBC’s Radio Three Evensong), and he collaborated on the extended song-cycle Parthenogenesis (or Virgin Birth), featured in the first BBC Philharmonic’s mini-series, MacMillan in Manchester. The story of the Virgin Birth as a theatrical production in the West End of London sends a significant cultural signal.
Major shifts come rarely in any discipline, whether in science or music. Yet pop musical prognosticators have said that there is a new rock group on the horizon that will redefine rock music in much the same way that the Beatles did. Simon Raymonde was so impressed with the group Lift to Experience (from Denton, Texas), that he exclaimed that they represented “the future of music” (presumably rock music).21 After hearing the group per-form at the famed South by Southwest musical showcase in Austin, Texas, Raymonde and his musical partner Robin Guthrie, from the Cocteau Twins, signed the unknown Texas band to the Bella Union label of London that very night. One critic said, “they use dynamics and instrumentation to surround you and draw you into the mood they create. One of the ways that mood is created is through emotion-filled lyrics that are full of gospel and cultural ref-erences.” 22 The members of Lift to Experience learned church hymns and gospel songs from the cradle in central Texas, and those roots are evident in their music and ethos. While contemporary Christian music has no doubt served the Christian subculture, it has always lacked a distinct identity as a musical discipline and has failed to affect the musical culture at large. Contemporary Christian bands are often (though not always) poor imitations of bands found in the mainstream music industry. Lift to Experience appears to be an exception to this, being a strikingly original musical endeavor shaped and influenced by Trinitarian theistic belief.
The lyrics are some of the few in popular music that have a mature understanding of Christianity and a genuine, heartfelt sense of longing for the divine, quoting scriptural concepts and phrases while leaving out Christianese clichés. This is pioneering, cutting-edge music that would not appeal to most CCM devotees. This is what music is supposed to do—touch the heart in the deepest, softest place and enrich the life of the listener.
The Transmodern in Visual Arts?
In the world of the visual arts, publications like Image and the American Arts Quarterly have provided a forum for this new wave. Image, in particular, intentionally explores the relationship between the Judeo-Christian faith and the various arts. In nominating Image for its twelfth-annual Alternative Press Awards, the Utne Reader said, “taking to task the representation of spirituality and religion in the arts, this quarterly journal digs into the depths of a taboo subject: what it means to be a spiritual being in the modern world.”23 One artist featured, for example, is Mary McCleary, whose work represents a “fullness of vision. . . . It is a particular and peculiar kind of fullness, one that is engorged with the fecundity of earth and the senses, and yet simultaneously inhabited by a silent and spiritual presence hovering—both imma-nent and transcendent—amidst all that is sensuous and of the earth.”24
Transmodern art is not breaking onto the scene without controversy. An intense debate went on at the Norwegian Academy of the Arts and in the newspapers of Norway in the mid-1990s over the issue of whether the Academy should offer classes in traditional figurative painting—seen by many as a reactionary reversion to classical education and a rejection of modernistic experimentation—and whether Odd Nerdrum, one of Norway’s best-known artists, should teach these classes. In the end, he withdrew his candidacy, but classical figurative painting was restored to the curriculum at the Academy.25
Bruno Civitico, an Italian contemporary classical painter who now resides in Charleston, South Carolina, specializes in the idealized female form. While he is not seen as a reactionary “resistant anti-modernist,” “classicism in the hands of Civitico is a traditional linguistic structure that is used to suggest a very contemporary story.”26 Sculptor Frederick Hart, who has been called America’s greatest living representational artist, has challenged the accepted “wisdom” in the contemporary art world. Running against the current, he affirms that the chief criteria of his artwork is beauty and substance. “My work,” he says, “isn’t art for art’s sake, it’s about life. I have no patience with obscure or unintelligible art—I want to be understood.”27 J. Carter Brown, Chairman Emeritus of the National Art Gallery, Washington, D.C., was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “in the contemporary spectrum Hart represents one end of it in comparison to contemporary sculptors who are working in total abstractionA Requiem for Postmodernism—Whither Now? 315or dissolving the medium into mutations. In his chosen end of it, he was as good as they get, a superb craftsman, a deeply spiritual person who was concerned with spiritual values.”28 His distinct contribution is summarized as follows: “In a century marked by nihilism, abstraction, and deconstruction, Hart exemplifies a returning tide to aesthetic and moral agendas embodied in the great ages of art in the past.”29 A circle of artists and other people of letters (self-named “Centerists”) have gathered around Hart to perpetuate this vision with meet-ings and continued discussions.
The Transmodern in Architecture, Poetry, and Cinema?
Notice should also be made in the field of architecture. Leon Krier is probably most popularly known as the planner of Poundbury, a planned British town in Dorset (created under the sponsorship of the Prince of Wales). Similar New Urbanism ideas lie behind such communities as Seaside in Florida (the setting for The Truman Show). Krier’s goal is for architecture to help us understand our place in history and the world. This “humane classicism,” or “modernity of traditional architecture,” has been opposed by others in the discipline, and he has been predictably called “reactionary.” In Architecture: Choice or Fate, Krier argues that those architects are responsible for producing their own obsolescence: “As long as artists arbitrarily assume the right to decide what is or is not art it is logical that the public will just as arbitrar-ily feel that they have the right to reject it.”30
As Dean of the School of Architecture at Notre Dame University, Thomas Gordon Smith leads a revival of classicism—but with tradition continued in innovative and creative ways.31 Architects like Smith are not just reactionary. Rather, they affirm that the past must be consulted for models of form and beauty.
The poet Dick Allen says, “we’ve gone on too long about how poetry should ‘show, rather than tell,’ when actually many—perhaps even most of our finest poems tell, make a judgment, are even didactic.”32 Allen believes that poetry should play a role in changing people’s lives, and hence it has a teach-ing role. The recovery of narrative and formalism is seen in Allen as well as in poets like Jack Butler, Lewis Steele, Paul Lake, and Fred Feirstein, while the modern- and postmodern-dominated university has been passed by. In review-ing Feirstein’s Ending the Twentieth Century, Arthur Mortensen says that “we are reminded of what we nearly lost in the long academic obsession with con-fessional poetry. We nearly lost what we find in Feirstein’s narratives: character; coherent story; historical context; location; and all those details of life external to the author’s private thoughts that make poetry worth reading, nearly sacrificed on the altars of Modernism and post-Modernism, whose high priests presumed the telling of stories outside one’s self to be not possible.”33
Ian Hamilton Finlay, known as “Scotland’s leading concrete poet,”draws on classical traditions while presenting his poetry almost entirely through visual art—“an art which led naturally to the arrangement of words on stone, wood, and other materials . . . (which) led naturally to the art of incorporating concrete poetry with garden design.”34 In Englishman Roger Wagner’s art, one finds several strands of artistic tradition merging: biblical themes and the pastoral English landscape, as well as the Renaissance. Wagner’s work is fundamentally rooted in the belief that God’s love brings hope in the face of evil and despair. Through his landscapes and still-life paintings, American David Ligare affirms that “painting is not only about what is, but what must be done . . . about goodness and morality . . . and a renewed sense of humanist values and social responsibility.”35 Art historian Charles Jencks says that Ligare “adopts unadulterated traditional conventions, but puts them to non-ideological use.”36
When one looks at popular cinema, one undoubtedly finds the standard fare of narcissistic hedonism and indulgent physical conflict that one has come to expect from this particular venue. However, when one takes a closer look at the nature of film, one recognizes that this medium is also well-suited to express the transmodern. After drawing parallels between the sufferings of Job and the protagonist of Clint Eastwood’s film Unforgiven (1992), one author says, “Movies such as Unforgiven may offer the most compelling places today to raise questions of religion and value.”37 Following the thought of Gerardus van der Leeuw, another writer affirms that, “It is not necessary to equate the essence of [cinematic] art with the essence of religion,” but, he continues, “we can observe . . . an essential unity between art and religion, for holiness and beauty appear in the same guise.”38Without too much effort, one can find outstanding films that could arguably be said to exemplify a transmodern approach. Directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky and M. Night Shyamalan come to mind.
Tarkovsky’s vision has been called “devoutly God-centered,” and the same author indicates that Tarkovsky himself endorses the view that legitimate knowledge must be based on morality.39 Such an affirmation coincides with the Platonic (and Augustinian) thesis of a connection between knowl-edge and virtue. Whether or not Tarkovsky is drawing on the resources of Plato or Augustine, such an endorsement, from the director of Solaris (1972), seems to constitute a decisive rejection of the postmodern denial of genuine knowledge and also a rejection of the modernist move to relegate value to the realm of the subjective.
Consider Shyamalan’s film Signs (2002). Here, without trivializing the horrors that smash down upon one’s life and without offering explanation for the brutality of suffering, Shyamalan embeds this horror and suffering within the context of an almost invisible and unfolding providence. No one particular thing can be singled out as the sign of providence. Rather, all the lines on the cinematic page simply converge and coalesce. One comes away from the film with an unmistakable sense of order—even though all the particulars seem to manifest the chaos of pain, grief, and waste. In other words, there is no particular thread that can be pointed to as a providential sign—the signs of providence emerge from the story’s tapestry as a whole.
The Transmodern in Ethics and Social-Political Philosophy?
If the gurus of postmodernism such as Foucault and Derrida are passé in their own homeland, what thinkers are beginning to shape philosophical thought in France today? One can find students reading such radical statements as the following from Philipps Beneton:
Tolerance is an ambiguous word greatly valued by the zeitgeist. Who dares declare himself against tolerance? There would be nothing left to say, how-ever, if the contemporary idea of tolerance was not fundamentally distorted.Properly understood, tolerance implies respect for people but not agreement with their error or fault. Thus ideas do not have to be “tolerant”—it is enough if they are correct. Real tolerance, in other words, is not incompatible with either firm convictions or the desire to persuade others.Tolerance simply rejects force and intimidation toward those who think differently. But today tolerance generally signifies something else—initially it tends to be equated with relativism and then it is identified with new norms of human life and thought. Put differently, tolerance now speaks a double language: The Reduction of Truth to Opinion.40
Beneton challenges this reduction. This challenge is reflected in the work of French political philosopher Pierre Manent. He argues that contemporary Western liberal democracies find themselves in a situation where political life does not serve any higher purposes. He traces this idea back to Machiavelli, who desired to separate politics from any idea of a cosmological moral order. Manent says the West has found itself in a situation where it has rejected the laws of God and nature in its quest for autonomy. The acquisition of this autonomy has come at a great loss: the meaning of humanity. Since everyone is autonomous and there are no objective common virtues, a common language for moral discourse has evaporated. The solution to this dilemma is to address the root causes by drawing upon the resources of both the classical and Christian traditions.41
We now turn to North American philosophy. Recent decades have shown a massive resurgence in the traditional philosophical disciplines from Christian theists. In recent years, books and articles written for the philosophical community from a Christian theistic perspective have flooded the press. The journal Faith and Philosophy, the journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers, has provided institutional support for influencing the discipline strategically.42 Noticeable is its influence and direction in moral and political philosophy. Natural law theory has its ablest defender in John Finnis of Notre Dame.43 Robert George, of Princeton University, also a lead-ing authority on natural law, defends objective truth, traditional marriage, and the sanctity of human life.44 In a public debate, George won an amazing concession from a leading postmodernist, Stanley Fish, when Fish, who denies the existence of universal truths, admitted that important moral issues can be debated even when people proceed from very different starting points.45
Western tradition from Aristotle to Aquinas has affirmed that moral law was innate. While modern philosophy (1) fundamentally rejects the notion of innate moral knowledge since man is reduced to mere ideological reflexes (as in Marxism), or (2) affirms a distinction between fact and value (as some philosophers of an empiricist bent attempt to maintain), or (3) posits moral statements as social constructs or fictions (as found in the postmodernism of Richard Rorty or Michel Foucault), other thinkers are now pointing forward by looking backwards.46
Alasdair MacIntyre leads the renewal of interest in the concept of virtue.47 MacIntyre argues that the language of moral discourse has been ripped from its historical context. So, while we have words like “good” and “moral,” true moral reasoning has been undermined. Leaving Marxism behind, MacIntyre draws upon the resources of both theology and the Aristotelian tradition. Martha Nussbaum, Bernard Williams, and Iris Murdoch (both in her technical philosophy as well as in her literary output) have led the attack against such contemporary cultural assumptions as Kant’s identification of morality with duty and Hume’s erroneous distinction between facts and values.48 In this same tradition Philippa Foot argues that virtue is necessary for happiness.49 As a theologian, Stanley Hauerwas seeks to build up moral discourse within the Christian community and wants to see virtue as a fundamental component of the Christian life.50
In his book The Moral Sense, James Q. Wilson argues against Thomas Hobbes (as well as against the majority of contemporary philosophical theories of human behavior), that people have an innate moral sense that is rooted in our biological makeup, while simultaneously being influenced by the environment and the socialization process. He argues that the cultural relativists focus too much on difference and not enough on cross-cultural simi-larities like fairness, self-control, and duty.51
CONCLUSION
A new transmodern vision seems to be emerging from diverse disciplines.52 This vision is neither uniform nor monolithic—nor is it necessarily theistic. But what it has in common is the rejection of the philosophical naturalists’ or materialists’ claims of modernism (viz., autonomous reason and unjustified progressive optimism) and the rejection of the fundamental assertions of postmodernism (viz., that truth is a community fiction, morals are social constructs, and tradition and classical influence are undesirable and illegit-imate). Transmodernists affirm objective and normative truth without capitulating to a naturalistic scientism, and they affirm true moral values and virtues. They hold out beauty, harmony, and wisdom as real possible entities. Cynicism based on modernistic naturalism and postmodern fictions are replaced by hope—a hope that is based on the very nature of things. While one might hesitate to predict the future of this movement (if indeed it can be called a movement), developments on the horizon appear to indicate that a significant (or even monumental) cultural shift is in the offing. Time will tell.
1 This chapter is an updated, expanded version of James Parker III, “A Requiem for Postmodernism—Whither Now?” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 5, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 50-61. Used with permission. I want to acknowledge that this revision was aided by the careful insights of Sloan Lee, a friend and recent Ph.D. in philosophy.
2 Many challenge the legitimacy of the term “postmodern” and assert that in reality it should be called “ultra-modern” since postmodernism is in many ways the logical extension of modernism, or as Anthony Gideens calls it, the “radicalizing of modernity” (The Consequences of Modernity [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990], 52). Paul Vitz calls it “morbid” modernism because“postmodernism . . . is the dissolving of modern certainties using modern logic itself” (Paul Vitz, “The Future of the University: From Post-modern to Transmodern,” in Rethinking the Future of the University, ed. David Lyle Jeffrey and Dominic Manganiello [Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1998], 106).
3 The politicization of the university with homosexual, feminist, and politically correct agendas has undermined the scholarly credibility of many academic disciplines. See Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York: Free Press, 1991).
4 One was a political philosophy major at Princeton University and the other in the humanities at Yale—one can find few if any postmodernists in the science departments, at least when they are applying the precepts to their own academic discipline.
5 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 6-7.
6 M. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, and Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 162.
7 For a sampling, see the following: Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1998); idem, Truth or Consequences: The Promise and Perils of Postmodernism (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2001);Roger Lundin, The Culture of Interpretation: The Christian Faith and the Postmodern World (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1993); Douglas Groothuis, Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of Postmodernism (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2000); D. A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1996); Peter Hicks, Evangelicals and Truth: A Creative Proposal for a Postmodern Age (Leicester, England: Inter-Varsity Press, 1998); Dennis McCallum, ed., The Death of Truth (Minneapolis: Bethany, 1996); and D.A. Carson, ed., Telling the Truth: Evangelizing Postmoderns (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2000).
8 For a critique of process thought, see Royce Gordon Gruenler, The Inexhaustible God: Biblical Faith and the Challenge of Process Theism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1983).
9 For critiques of these evangelicals, see especially Erickson’s and Groothuis’s works cited above.
10 Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 6 vols. (1976–1983; reprint, Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 1999).
11 For example see the following: Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1999); and the essays in chapters 7 and 8 in Timothy R. Phillips and Dennis L. Okholm, eds., Christian Apologetics in the Postmodern World (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press: 1995). Ironically, the publishers are probably producing more works on apologetics than ever before, and evangelical schools are teaching more apologetics than before. Also, churches specializing in reaching “postmoderns” often make great use of apologetics. Two examples of popular apologetics picked up by Harper Collins Publishers are Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ (Zondervan/Harper Collins, 1998) and Jeffrey L. Sheler’s Is The Bible True? How Modern Debates and Discoveries Affirm the Essence of the Scriptures (Zondervan/Harper Collins, 1999). Strobel was formerly a teaching pastor at Willow Creek Community Church (Chicago), known for reaching the secular culture. He is now on staff at Saddleback Valley Community Church in Southern California, holding a similar position to the one held at Willow Creek.
12 Vitz, “Future of the University,” 13. In an attempt to provide minimal formulation of Vitz’s notion of the transmodern, one might say that the transmodern (a) rejects skepticism and subjectivism by affirming the possibility of attaining genuine knowledge—that is, it affirms that there are non-subjective facts that can be known; (b) takes the deliverances of empirical science seriously—at least when those deliverances are not viewed as the only source of interpersonal knowledge; (c) affirms the centrality of value, along with moral and theological knowledge, in rationally shaping and directing human experience; and (d) recognizes that the mere application of technology will neither rid the human heart of wretchedness or cruelty nor endow life with significance or nobility. Whether or not the transmodern will turn out to be something new—or simply a retooling of the premodern—isn’t entirely clear.
13 Ibid., 116.
14 Available online at http://www.terryriley.com/biography.htm.
15 Available online at http://www.schirmer.com/composers/adams_bio.html.
16 James Harley and Maja Trochimczyk, “Henryk Mikolaj Górecki”; available online at http://www.usc.edu/dept/polish%5Fmusic/composer/gorecki.html. For an extensive list of works, discography, and bibliography, see the following: http://www.usc.edu/dept/polish_music/VEPM/gorecki/ gortitle.html.
17 G. Schirmer Promotion Department, “John Tavener”; available online at http://www.schirmer.com/ composers/tavener/bio.html.
18 Paul Hillier, Arvo Pärt: Oxford Studies of Composers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
19 Trey Clegg, “Arvo Pärt”; available online at http://www.musiclog.com/part_periods.asp.
20 Patrick 2000, “The Company of Heaven”; available online at http://www.peelcom.com/partick2000/ pages/cohmusic.html.
21 Wade Chamberlain, “Lift to Experience”; available online at http://fakejazz.com/reviews/lift.shtml.
22 Ibid.
23 Cited online at http://www.imagejournal.org.
24 Wayne L. Roosa, “A Fullness of Vision: Mary McCleary’s Collages,” Image 23 (Summer 1999): 32.
25 For a sample of Nerdrum’s works, see http://www.nerdrum.com. For a discussion of the issue from the Academy director’s perspective (where he conceded that such classical training was making a comeback in Europe) see http://www.norway.origo.no/culture/embla/art/pettersson.html. For a very interesting and intriguing discussion of attempts to “change the guard” of the New York art establishment (complete with protests) see “Adieu to the Avant-Garde: As the Artistic Regime Shifts, Realism, Rhyme, and Representation Make a Comeback” by Kanchan Limaye in Reason Online, at http://www.reason.com/9707/fe.limaye.html.
26 Mary Gilkerson, “Bruno Civitico’s Exploration of the Female Figure”; available online at http://www.free-times.com/reviews/art_reviews/civitico.html. Other artists to be considered in this wave would be James Aponovich’s landscapes and still-life works and the works of John Stuart Ingle, Martha Mayer Erlebacher, and Audrey Flack. As evidence of a growing interest in this traditional approach to art pedagogy, the New York Academy of Art: Graduate School of Figurative Art in New York City attracts people from around the world to come and study traditional approaches to painting, figure drawing, anatomy, art history, and sculpture. Ironically one of the founders of the institution in 1982 was Andy Warhol because he felt that his artistic preparation was lacking due to the absence of this kind of curriculum.
27 Cited at http://www.frederickhart.com/hexton.html.
28 Cited at http://www.frederickhart.com. See this site for a fair sampling of his works and bibliography.
29 James F. Cooper, “Frederick Hart: Rebel with a Cause”; available online at http://www.worldandi.com/ public/ 1992/ april/ar10.cfm.
30 Cited at http://www.salon.com/books/sneaks/1998/10/29sneaks.html.
31 Thomas Gordon Smith, Classical Architecture: Rule and Invention (Layton, Utah: G. M. Smith, 1988) presents the case for the revival of classical forms and precepts.
32 Cited at http://www.csf.edu/countermeasures/colloquium7-4.html.
33 Arthur Mortensen, at http://home.earthlink.net/~arthur505/rev996.html. Mortensen continues:Jump outside of poetry for a moment and imagine Paths of Glory, Stanley Kubrick’s picture of the First World War. Take away the portraits of corrupt general officers, of the four young men condemned to die, of the colonel caught in the middle of a conspiracy. Take away the precisely observed life and death of trench warfare. Take away the enlisted men’s club where Dietrich sang. Take away the refined insulation of the officers’ club. What’s left? Of course nothing is left. Yet for a long time after the Second World War, particularly since the late 1960’s, critics and poets alike in America have debunked what is interesting in narratives, rationalizing that by saying that the story-teller’s choices are only personal or political preferences, thus giving the lie to the narrator’s claim to be able to tell a story outside of his or her own prejudices. What bunk! Of course authors pick according to their preferences; so do all human beings. Where there is a conjunction of an author’s preferences with those of other people, an author gets an audience, and, if that conjunction lasts or reoccurs later on, the author will come back into fashion. So what? This is news? Frederick Feirstein has wondered about that kind of intellectual sleight-of-hand for decades, written essays about it, demonstrated on behalf of different directions he felt were right, but his most significant action was to be one of the founders of the Expansive poetry movement, which for the last 20 years has been the most exciting source of poetry in America. For, in joining that cause, Feirstein bucked theory and went to work as a poet. The results, both here, and in his other books, are strong stories, vivid characters, and unforgettable locations, all conveyed with a poetic art as good as anyone in his generation.
34 For a discussion of the history and development of concrete poetry, see http://www.greenfairy.com/ dissertation.intro.html.
35 See http://www.hackettfreedmangallery.com/hfg/html/contemphtml/ligare_html/ligare_main.html for some of his paintings.
36 Charles Jencks, Post-Modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1987), 37.
37 Sara Anson Vaux, Finding Meaning at the Movies (Nashville: Abingdon, 1999), 20.
38 Robert K. Johnston, Reel Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2000), 56.
39 Vaux, Finding Meaning at the Movies, 72.
40 Cited at http://www.catholic.net/RCC/Periodicals/Crisis/Apr96/beneton.html. See how this plays out in the area of human rights in Philipps Beneton, “The Languages of the Rights of Man,” First Things 37 (November 1993): 9-12.
41 Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996); and idem, The City of Man (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).
42 In the United States names such as Alvin Plantinga, George Mavrodes, Nicholas Wolterstorff, William P. Alston, Robert Adams, Robert Audi, Eleonore Stump, Peter van Inwagen and many others too numerous to name have made historic theism a force to be reckoned with in the philosophical world.
43 John Finnis, Aquinas: Moral, Political and Legal Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); and idem, Moral Absolutes: Tradition, Revision and Truth (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1991).
44 Robert George, Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) deals with public policy, while his authority on natural law was established with In Defense of Natural Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
45 Robert George had critiqued Fish’s liberal views on abortion and particularly the issue of whether the right to life of a fetus was a purely “religious” issue. Fish held that it was, until he was convinced by George’s arguments and proceeded to publicly repudiate his former pro-choice views at the American Political Science Association. See the story online at http://www.boundless.org/1999/departments/ isms/a0000029.html.
46 In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty says that there is no normative and universal answer to the question, “why not be cruel?” Of course, if morality is a fiction, then he is right. Ironically Rorty and Foucault make all kinds of moral judgments, but since the basis for those judgments has evaporated, the result is incoherence.
47 See especially Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984); and idem, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989). For a helpful overview, see Edward T. Oakes, “The Achievement of Alasdair MacIntyre,” First Things 65 (August/September 1996): 22-26.
48 For a summary of Murdoch’s thought, life, and complete bibliography, see http://kirjasto.sci.fi/ imurdoch.htm and http://murdoch.shape9.nl. On the theological importance of Murdoch’s writings see Alan Jacobs, “Go(o)d in Iris Murdoch,” First Things 50 (February 1995): 32-36. For a bibliography of Nussbaum’s works, see: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/indiv/scctr/philosophy/nussbaum.html.
49 For example, see Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices—And Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Oxford:Clarendon, 2002).
50 Stanley Hauerwas, Christians Among the Virtues (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997); idem, Wilderness Wanderings: Probing Twentieth Century Theology and Philosophy (New York:Westview, 1997); and idem, Sanctifying Them for the Truth: Holiness Exemplified (Nashville: Abingdon, 1998) are three of his recent works that build his virtue-based Christian ethic.
51 James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense (New York: Free Press, 1995). A writer having a significant influence in the area of modern identity-formation is Canadian Charles Taylor in his works Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989) and The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). He deals foundationally with the formation of human identity. He affirms the inherent cultural worth in “The Politics of Recognition,”in Multiculturalism, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).
52 It could be noted that in the culture at large over one million copies of one Spanish Benedictine album have been sold, over two million hardcover copies of William Bennett’s The Book of Virtues, as well as several million copies of John Paul II’s Threshold of Hope (1994), where he articulates what could be called a transmodern vision.