Realism and Faith

By Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos

June 2020

Observing the events of history and society, we find that humanity has gone through modernism in relation with rationalism, thought, science, progress, etc., and then came postmodernism, which challenged the sturdy foundations, challenged all certainties, objectivity, etc.

In an article of the Daily News, Tasoula Karaiskaki stressed that the seed of doubt and controversy, which characterizes our time, has become "dynamite that divides everything", "it has become a weapon in the hands of conspiracy theorists and populists, pseudo-experts, the superstitious and all kinds of deniers," who question everything such as "climate change, the sphericity of the earth, the effectiveness of vaccines, the existence of the coronavirus".

The Myth of a Postmodern Era

By Mark Sayers

For the last ten to fifteen years a great fallacy has clouded debate around the future of the Church in the West. The fallacy goes something like this. At some stage (depending on who you talk to), but most likely in the nineteen nineties the post modern era began. All of a sudden everything changed and a line was drawn in history. On one side were the postmodernists and on the other the modernists. The modernists were enslaved to a highly cerebral, hegemonic view of the world. They were obsessed with progress and holding the world at a cold calculated distance. They were beholden to technology, and if they were religious were either dogmatic fundamentalists or materialist liberals. They hated anything non-Western or from the past, and lived in Le Corbusier designed buildings where they almost suffocated on their own sense of hubris.

Then there was the postmodernists and apparently they were coming so we had to be ready, or had to become postmodern ourselves. The young were postmodern and the future was postmodern. The postmodernists were everything that the modernists were not, they loved spirituality instead of religion, were embracing of the non-West, the past, and anything experiential. They had piercings and hated objective truth. The implications were clear, soon Western culture would morph into a giant rave where we would find ourselves dancing to tribal techno with an dreadlocked Austrian backpacker/Yoga practitioner named Helga.

The Postmodern Sacred

Emily McAvan’s interesting thesis, summarized in an issue of the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, has now been expanded in her recently published thesis The Postmodern Sacred: Popular Culture Spirituality in the Science Fiction, Fantasy and Urban Fantasy Genres. Below is an abstract of McAvan's earlier thesis along with a link, together with a description of her book:

By Emily McAvan

Division of Arts

Murdoch University

Journal of Religion and Popular Culture

Vol. 22(1)-Spring 2010

Abstract

I argue that the return of the religious in contemporary culture has been in two forms: the rise of so-called fundamentalisms in the established faiths—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, even Buddhist—and the rise of a New Age style spirituality that draws from aspects of those faiths even as it produces something distinctively different. I argue that this shift both produces postmodern media culture and is itself always already mediated through the realm of the fictional. Secular and profane are always entangled within one another, a constant and pervasive media presence that modulates the way that contemporary subjects experience themselves and their relationship to the spiritual. I use popular culture as an entry point, an entry point that can presume neither belief nor unbelief in its audiences, showing that it is “unreal” texts such as Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Matrix, The Passion of the Christ and Left Behind that we find religious symbols and ideas refracted through a postmodernist sensibility, with little regard for the demands of “real world” epistemology. I argue that it is in this interplay between traditional religions and New Age-ised spirituality in popular culture that the sacred truly finds itself in postmodernity.

Read the entire study here.

The Intolerance of Tolerance

The Intolerance of Tolerance

Gregory Koukl

Probably no concept has more currency in our politically correct culture than the notion of tolerance. Unfortunately, one of America's noblest virtues has been so distorted it's become a vice.

There is a modern myth that holds that true tolerance consists of neutrality. It is one of the most entrenched assumptions of a society committed to relativism.

The tolerant person occupies neutral ground, a place of complete impartiality where each person is permitted to decide for himself. No judgments allowed. No "forcing" personal views. Each takes a neutral posture towards another's convictions.

This approach is very popular with post-modernists, that breed of radical skeptics whose ideas command unwarranted respect in the university today. Their rallying cry, "There is no truth," is often followed by an appeal for tolerance.