Reimaging Xianity in the wake of Modernism's passing
Posts tagged self
Monday Morning Reading
Jul 19th
Here are a few interesting reads from this past week. There’s something for everyone.*
Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs | Atomic Robo vs. the X-Men in… “The Time Topic” – Self explanatory, meaning, if you don’t get it by the link title, you aren’t into comics or time travel and you should just go ahead and skip it.
On [...]
Bellah on Community and Individualism
Jul 15th
We find ourselves not independently of other people and institutions but through them. We never get to the bottom of ourselves on our own. We discover who we are face to face and side by side with others in work, love, and learning. All of our activity goes on in relationships, groups, associations, and communities ordered by institutional structures and interpreted by cultural patterns of meaning…
We are part of a larger whole that we can neither forget nor imagine in our own image without paying a high price.
If we are not to have a self that hangs in the void, slowly twisting in the wind, these are issues we cannot ignore. – Robert Bellah
Summer Reading: Eve’s Revenge
Jun 6th
Eve’s Revenge by Lilian Calles Barger
I’ve mentioned this book a few times around here. I am slowly but surely working my way through it. It is one of those rare gems. Rarely is there a book that takes modern feminist theory, a good Christian view of sexuality, complex philosophical argumentation, layman’s writing. I cannot recommend [...]
Links for your face
May 21st
It is good to see the postmodern dream of the reinsertion of the mind back into its body happening in Christian circles. Some of my friends are denouncing the Cartisian mind/body duality as a form of Neo-Gnosticism, and for good reason. I’d tell you more about it but that’s what the links are for.
Desire Bordering [...]
Some Malformed Thoughts on Edwards and True Religion
Apr 20th
In my Church history class I was asked to read A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections by Jonathan Edwards and to give some commentary on it. The below are my first thoughts when I read the text. Incidentally, I have just taught over the Descartes-Locke-Hume-Kant debate over the nature of the self during the Enlightenment period, [...]
The Modern, Post-Enlightenment Mind
Apr 17th
The Modern, Post-Enlightenment mind assumes that knowledge is certain, objective, and good. It presupposes that the rational, dispassionate self can obtain such knowledge. It presupposes that the knowing self peers at the mechanistic world as a neutral observer armed with the scientific method.
The modern knower engages in the knowing process and believing that knowledge [...]
Kant’s Basis of Category and Nietzsche’s Response
Feb 22nd
“Nietzsche is not merely repeating what Kant had said a century earlier. Kant argued that the self constructs knowledge by means of transcendental categories derived from the mind, which he assumed to be structurally the same in all persons.persons. He believed that this sameness of structure — this shared human nature — provides the foundation [...]
Subject-Object Dualism
Feb 18th
“[The] feature of Cartesianism that has received the most criticism is its inherent subject-object dualism. If the self is a thinking subject, then the self necessarily perceives every other kind of thing as an object. The resultant distinction between subject and object endows the subject with greater importance than the object. It sets the knowing [...]
Beings in the World
Feb 17th
“Heidegger contends that the human being is not primarily a thinking self, a subject that engages in cognitive acts; rather, we are above all else beings-in-the-world, enmeshed in social networks.”[1]
Notes:
A Primer on Postmodernism (Stanley J. Grenz) – Highlight Loc. 1602-3 [↩]Scridb filter
Descartes and the creation of the Body
Feb 16th
“But by focusing on the thinking self, Descartes relegates the body to a sphere outside of and apart from the thinking subject.”[1]
Notes:
A Primer on Postmodernism (Stanley J. Grenz) – Highlight Loc. 1586-87 | Added on Tuesday, January 19, 2010, 07:11 PM [↩]Scridb filter
The Resurrection of Drama – A Review of Kingdom Triangle by Moreland
Dec 7th
In this wildly ambitious work, Moreland seeks to cure Christianity from the malaise that plagues – the death of drama; he is mostly successful, though not for the reasons he would give. Written for a popular audience, the Kingdom Triangle is divided into two sections; the first attempts to show us the “crisis of our [...]
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