February 15, 2012 at 6:31 pm
My fiancée and I went out to eat at the Friendly Toast in Cambridge, MA, recently. While there, we were talking, of course, about hipsters. (For those of you who have never been to the Friendly Toast, it both serves tasty, innovative food and is swarming with hipsters.) Specifically, we talked about hipsters and irony, […]
February 1, 2012 at 8:22 am
I was reading Parker Palmer’s book The Courage to Teach recently. In it, he presents what he calls a relational model of truth, which he contrasts with an “objectivist” and a relativist view of truth. I thought it worth repeating here, because I think it is a good example of how modernity, postmodernity, and what-comes-next […]
November 1, 2011 at 3:11 pm
I would like to suggest two metaphors describing how societal unity has functioned in the past and how societal unity might function in the future. In the past, societal unity has been like playing house. In the world of what comes next, I think societal unity needs to be like playing Legos. Playing house is […]
After a week and a half’s hiatus (ah, the start of summer!), we’re back and blogging. Today, I’d like to talk about a topic that I think will weave together some threads from the last three or four posts, and that’s the relationship between postmodernity, the West, and the Majority World. It’s generally acknowledged that […]
I agreed to give a lecture on postmodernity for the class I TA last week. But as I was planning this lecture, I thought it would be not very postmodern and more than a little boring of me to just stand and talk about postmodernity. So instead, I designed a participatory lecture. I wrote down […]
Last week, I wrote a post discussing the southward shift in Christianity, also referred to as the rise of Global Christianity. Since I talk a lot about modernity, postmodernity, and whatnot in this blog, an obvious question might be how the rise of Global Christianity relates to these historical eras. The class I’ve been TAing […]
April 22, 2011 at 12:17 pm
While the title of this blog post may seem flippant, I do mean it to raise serious questions about how well Christians are using new modes of communication. Also, please don’t hate me for posting seemingly flippant things on Good Friday. I hope all Christian readers of this blog have a solemn and meaningful end […]
April 13, 2011 at 9:20 am
I’m a historian of Christianity. One of the things historians like to do is divide history into periods. If you’ve been reading this blog, you’ve probably gotten a sense of the periodization of history I’ve been using, but I thought I’d summarize it here and then share some reflections on the process of periodizing church […]
On Tuesday, I posted the first half of a description of how I would characterize a periodization of history broken into Christendom, modernity, postmodernity, and what comes next. This post completes that description. Let me reiterate my three caveats: 1. All of my answers for “what comes next” are just guesses. Since it comes next, […]
I’ve promised you loyal readers some elaboration on what I think are the characteristics of postmodernity. I’m going to structure part of this answer by comparing Christendom, modernity, postmodernity, and what comes next (one possible periodization of the last 1000 years of Christian history; I’ll write a post on periodizing church history later). I’ve structured […]