Blogger Tony Jones points us to a brilliant article by Alan Kirby: The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond | Philosophy Now.

Jones, a leader in emergent Christianity continues to fight battles with conservative Christians and deploys Kirby on his side. However, what I found most interesting in Kirby’s piece was the last paragraph:

This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which also characterises the pseudo-modern cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism. You click, you punch the keys, you are ‘involved’, engulfed, deciding. You are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author’; there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded.

It’s a scathing analysis of contemporary culture and the contemporary self, with devastating implications for Christianity, beginning with his notion that the typical emotional state is “the trance” and the concluding riff: there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded.

And speaking of postmodernism, the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions recently passed. An assessment of its impact on science, philosophy, and culture by David Weinberger.