Not all the contributions to this book are noted here - some weren't worth it. Most compilations are curate's eggs, and this one is more than most. Some chapters were dire, other brilliant, especially Falk who will be finding his way into an assignment of mine one way or another
"Postmodern" best defined as reaction to modernity rather than trying to enumerate its characteristics. Deconstructive postmodernism reacts to modern worldview by deconstructing or eliminating necessity for worldview e.g. God, self, purpose, meaning, real world, truth as correspondence. Constructive postmodernism revises modern premisses and traditional concepts. Unityof scientific, ethical, aesthetic and religious intuitions. xi - Going beyond the modern world will involve transcending its individualism, anthropocentrism, patriarchy,mechanisation, economism, consumerism, nationalism and militarism. Inclusive emancipation must be from modernity itself. Wishes to keep positive meaning for human self, historical meaning, truth as correspondence, and also premodern notions of divine reality, cosmic meaning, enchanted nature.
7 Prehension as the fundamental form of perception. To speak of prehension is to speak of mysticism, i.e. direct, unmediated contact with another experience. Seeing a tree is mediated. Feeling my body and knowing my memory are unmediated. I don't agree - don't we interpret everything, including the signals from our own bodies?
15 Spirituality = heart-knowledge and being. Also about power: creativity, justice, compassion. An alternative power: spirituality of non-violence. Prophet as mystic-in-action -
Steps
Current dominant view of spiritualtiy is climbing Jacob's ladder: we should change to dancing Sarah's dance.
22 Godhead - the complete mystery. God - the part that involves itself in hsitory. Godhead includes the feminine. "Modern" spirituality, committed to patriarchy, has lost sense of living Godhead.
23 possibility of Christolatry, or Jesusolatry
25 Panentheism - truly adult, mystic imagining of divine/nature relationship - remembering that humans are nature.
Mystical journey in 4 paths (Plotinus and Proclus - 3 ways - Purgation, Illumination, Union)
Creativity finds its fullest expression in the transformation of society. A theology of the Holy Spirit, because the Holy Spirit invites all prophets to interfere.
29 The person who understands what I have to say about justice understands everything I have to say.
believes there is religious intuition in Jesus' teaching that affects the mode of world construction that counters the darkness of Cain and Abel.
Individual and community linked. Community must be healthy for individual to be healthy. Inj Jesus God calls relational web to submit to transformation. Texture of patterns and relationships - Jesus addresses the patterns.
Jesus uses the "father" name of God not as a legitimation for existing patriarchal power structures in society or church but as a critical subversion of all structures of domination.
59-60 Galatians 3.27-28 says Paul understands baptism puts an end to inequality of patriarchal marriage.
we are not related because we love; we are already related. Love redeems the relatedness.
on love of war (Vietnam veteran).
- girls have more empathy; boys more rigid and distinct selves.
Emphasis on Freudian analysis of male castration anxiety and etymological link to castle/defence. Links nuclear to nux and then to balls some dodgy etymology going on here. Healing requires facing; warriors do not face; warriors cringe hmmm
Modernity pre-eminently based on Oedipal competition between males. 76 Enemy Other becomes distant through technology - disconnected. This overdoes the difference made by modernity; people have always been able to disconnect. Also overdoes the difference between men and women.
Categorisation of societal identity - premodern, modern, postmodern. Distinct yet interpenetrated.
84 For premodern societies religion was indispensable to avoid a sense of arbitrary dependence on the caprice of nature.
85 many societies - and their religions - resolutely modernist. Some reactionary. Some linked to repession etc.Only in Europe and parts of Latin America does one discern a consistent pattern of antimodernist religious outlooks opposing the normative deficiencies of modernism.
86 voluntarist interpretation of secularisation - facilitates government efficiency and also for unified politics of state in face of religious pluralism with its background of devastating sectarian warfare.
88-9 liberation theology a big challenge to the USA; threat of no longer being able to call Marxism godless.
90-1 conservative religion mixing with politics e.g. Iran, Poland, Christian right in USA. 91 The appearance of American fundamentalism in the form of "the moral majority" and evangelical Christianity has represented a determined assault on the lifestyle of secular modrnity, especially as embodied in big cities. This sort of fundamentalism reconciles many Americans to their pessimistic expectation of nuclear doom by converting this dread of catastrophe into the realisation of a divine plan.
92-3 My hypothesis is this: the complex modern project to apply science and technology to human problems has encountered several severe challenges that are undermining both its legitimacy as a creed and its coherence as a basis for action. Simplistically put, modernism as practised has given us nuclearism, an overwrought encounter between human activity and ecological viability, as well as an atomised social fabric whose members suffer from acute forms of alientation. Narrative and spiritual blinders have not well served the human species, at least not in this country [USA]. Of course, the modernist logic continues to lure many of us with its promises to overcome with technology the difficulties that technology has created: more modernisation for the Third World; computerised democracy; and the strategic defence initiative (SDI) for a superpower. But the crisis of modernism is generating nonmodernist responses as well. To cope successfully we are urged by some to look backward (a heroic premodern antecedent) and by others to strive for a far greener future (a heroic postmodern prospect). Both nostalgia and aspiration are emotive expressions of discontent with the instrumental modes of fulfilment associated with modernist solutions.
Religion provides the materials out of which to fashion either type of response, and thereby to recast politics. Marxism - as a radical politics attractive to the oppressed - often fails to mobilise mass support in the cultural circumstances of Third World and non-Western societies and is substantially discredited in many societies. Liberalism - as a moderate politics attractive to those with humane values and middle-class interests - cannot ground its convictions (which are generally little more than calculations) on terrain that is firm enough to support radical societal restructuring or normative risk-taking of any consequence. A religious radicalism has far greater mass appeal, especially given an overall disenchantment with the Soviet model and with the dismal experience of revolutionary guidance issued from Moscow. A religious grounding deepens and extends struggle, enabling mass forms of resistance that incur risks and accept sacrifice, insists upon an agenda of radical restructuring, and yet does not abandon normative discipline. The secular mentality tends to depersonalise suffering, whereas the religious mentality generally regards seriousness about suffering as central to its undertaking. Of course, religious fundamentalism drives out modernism, but in a bloody manner.
98-100 Postmodern revision - variety of attempts - nothing has yetgelled into a pattern that can claim to be postmodern.
103 modern culture entering a fundamental crisis, essence is that the foundational cultural vision of the modern world - the mechanistic dream of autonomous freedom and progress - is failing to regenerate our ecological, social and spiritual life. Within this crisis, the basic contradiction is revealed in modernity's fundamental degradation of work, linked to an expanding attack on the family. Further, this cultural attack on the family and work is reinforced by certain strains of Western spirituality that have played a strategically central role in both classical and modern Christianity.
112 left wing attack on the family from psychological side, right wing attack on family from economic side.
113 secularisation as a misdiagnosis - current crisis has roots in classical civilisation.
Modern commitment to growth - a nineteenth century solution. Land, natural resources, pollution etc not considered as part of economic equation. Economics based on radically isntrumentalist view; if community stands in the way of growth etc, it gets destroyed like everything else. Need for postmodern economic theory.
132 on new economic paradigm. Four propositions - need for holistic approach; long term view; need to see economics as empirical; need to see economics as political economy. Influenced by philosophy of . on steady state economics.
134 mixure of market and planning based on four principles.
167 Jesus seminars concluded Jesus' story/ies disorienting. Late nineteenth century rediscovery of apocalyptic orienting stories, and a bit later Marxism as an orienting story. Marxism became purged of narrative elements and became 168 methodological torso.
169 Increasing elusiveness of subject or self, partly because we now see self as incapable of making/changing history. Structuralism - meaning as deriving from tensions of opposites - life-death, male-female, etc - rather than as produced by self. Hence subjectivity of author and reader tend to be regarded not as autonomous but as cultural products.
170 flow of life seems repetitious, even repressive. Thuss tories with meaning are subversive.
171 "hermeneutics of suspicion" - postmodernism's openness and freedom operate always within constraints laid down by Marx and Freud.