Builders

Builders

What’s the Story?

One of the great myths of postmodernism is its celebration of the death of the "meta-narrative", its paradoxical claim that the only universal truth is that there is no universal truth. But this is a lie, for never has humankind been so dominated by a single meta-narrative as it is today, when global capitalism threatens to eliminate every other narrative and every other meaning from human life. While the histories and traditions which have bound people together and conferred upon communities a sense of meaning and belonging are under siege from all directions, a relentless and inhumane system of global economics is sweeping away the last vestiges of human dignity and hope for those who are exiled, exploited and commodified by the wars, corruptions and burgeoning inequalities which our economic system brings in its wake. This is the context in which we must situate our reflections if we want to ask why so many people are attracted to rigid and dogmatic forms of religion.
— Tina Beatie, The end of postmodernism: the “new atheists” and democracy, openDemocracy, 20071220

 

Cross Trees

Cross Trees

Noticed by:

Therese, Aussie Coffee Shop, for Catholic Carnival 151
 

Spe Salvi

Click on the applet to start/stop it.

Spe Salvi

See also Credo.

Noticed by:

Melissa, A Third Way, for Catholic Carnival 150

C.E.H. Wiedel, Kicking Over My Traces

Sarah, Just Another Day of Catholic Pondering
 

Extraordinary Time

Many people who talk about religion and irreligion aren't sufficiently aware of how extraordinary our time is:

[By 1920] five hundred years of creation and logical evolution were everywhere coming to an end; an era of civilization was reaching its close — political, social, and cultural. New paths must be cut in the unknown or else — stagnation. Desperate chromaticism, the 5-tone scle, polytonality, atonality, the 12-tone row and its variants were at once symptoms of decadence and groping efforts to find a new organizing principle for sound, just as the technical innovations of Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, Simultaneity in poetry (the choric poem), and Joycean discombobulations of language were the groping efforts of other artists to leave behind them the barren ground to which a half millennium of high art since the Renaissance had brought them. The surrounding fads, marked by self-conscious humor and bright charlatanism, were the normal devices by which which a culture destroys itself and ensures its leveling down to nothingness.
— Jacques Barzun (1971, reprinted 1982)

Continue to feel and think.
 

Confusionism

A New Confucian sect whose adherents, informally known as Typos, use ASUS Eee PCs to write to Usenet newsgroups. Confusionism was founded by Dead de Bury. I am a member, though not devout.