back from the dead

having completely forgotten the complex username i had given myself, as well as my password, i've been offline for rather a long time.

but i'm back, and ready now to make a go of this blog thing:

have just read an amazing book, Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey, which has me thinking deeply about the dichotomisation of the world after the emergence of the public sphere in the early modern period. Pearcey holds that the dichotomised thinking that created the polarised public/private, male/female, reason/passion etc thinking has contributed to the polarisation of Christianity from its intellectual past. its a very interesting premise, and she argues eloquently for the reintegration of those polar opposites into all aspects of the Christian life.

while i'm no defender of postmodern theorising, i am an advocate for the use of some of the techniques that have emerged from postmodern thought, and i have to say i am disappointed that such a rigorous Christian thinker fails to give due credit to postmodernism in its dismantling of those dichotomies. Feminist and postcolonialist thinkers have been instrumental in embarking on the process of taking apart these damaging and ultimately unhelpful ways of viewing the world. I would hope that as Christian thinkers, we are able to acknoweldge the very real contribution of postmodernist thinkers and practitioners to aspects of the intellectual life, despite disagreeing with the cultural relativism that often dominates their worldview. i think in particular we have to acknowledge 'reading against the grain' as a valuable tool in many disciplines, including theology; when we seek to find the authentic voice of a text, reading what is left unsaid or looking at who is ommitted from the account can open up the text and take us closer to the intentions of the author.

Another aspect of the need to differentiate between the conclusions of postmodern theorists, and the very useful techniques they employ, is in the postmodern requirement that authorial bias is acknoweldged. while this emerges from a belief in the absence of objective truth, when authors acknowledge the bias - their background, theories, worldviews - it allows the reader to analyse according to the bias. Pearcey decries Darwinist 'true believers' who act as if their position is 'objective' because they are scientists, asking that since Christian authors/scientists etc are always identified as such in the media, that Darwinists be identified too - this position echoes the postmodern theory that objectivity is unattainable and that authorial bias should always be acknowledged. it is certainly something that i do in my professional work: my background, beliefs, and worldviews will always colour the way i understand material, whether i want them to or not. better to acknowledge that bias and get on with it . . . the difficulty being that the acknowledgement of a Christian worldview would be professional suicide, since within the academy the profession of such beliefs runs counter to what Pearcey eloquently describes as two-tiered thinking, wherein it is toatlly acceptable for sceintists to 'believe' in theories like evolution, but totally unacceptable for those working in the humanities to step outside the materialism and cultural relativism that dominate there.

a powerful experience, to have that difficulty in the academic life acknowledged and written about so thoughtfully - and i would love to hear from anyone who has also read the book, so we can be like the english geek i am, and discuss . . .