Up front let me acknowledge that I am a middle-aged, caucasian, \u00a0female, Christian from Canada. This is inescapably the subjective space from which I encounter the world. I recognize that I have \u00a0inherited privilege and power because of these identities. These details don\u2019t solely define me and there are many more that would offer more insight, but if put in a room with others who self-identified in a similar way, we would already have a lot more in common than these identities. Embracing that I cannot interpret the world from outside this lens has led me to be curious about the lenses that others interpret the world through and to be humble enough to know that because I come from a particular context, with a particular identity, I cannot claim to be an authority of how people from other contexts might experience and interpret the world. This has been a gift from postmodern thought to my ministry.<\/p>\n
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I fell in love with Jesus as a child, with Kant, Hegel, Derrida and Foucault in my undergraduate and with Greek and New Testament Theology in Seminary. Fortunately literary close readings were good preparation for exegetical approaches to Biblical study. Through my study, I persistently brought two questions with me: How might this help me love God more? How might this help me love others more? Perhaps it is this starting point that has permitted me to see value and opportunity in postmodern thought.<\/p>\n
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Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault<\/em> did not seek to highlight the value and opportunity within this school of thought, but rather to portray it as the result of the \u201canger and despair\u201d of failed counter-enlightenment and socialist experiments.<\/a>[1] This is an unsurprising approach from Canadian-American philosopher Stephen R. C. Hicks, who teaches at Rockford University. (Incidentally we share an Alma mater in the University of Guelph where he received both his B.A. and M.A. Had he attended fifteen years later we may have been classmates.) As a Senior Scholar for The Atlas Society,<\/a>[2]<\/strong> <\/em>Hicks brings an analytic objectivist critique to Postmodern thought. Ayn Rand embodied this perspective in the fictional protagonist of The Fountainhead, <\/em>\u00a0Howard Roark. Roark is characterized by individualism, reason and innovation and is set in contrast to the altruistic character Peter Keating. Rand uses Keating to demonstrate that selflessness and sacrifice are contra to flourishing and are harmful to humanity.<\/a>[3] It seemed evident in my reading that Keating was meant to stand in for Christianity. All that to say, while Hicks critique has validity, his Randian worldview does not suggest a Christian perspective. Let me thus offer some of the opportunities of postmodern thought.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n