"The Disease They Call Post- Modernism.."

"They didn't know what they were caring for, they only knew what they were against.."

At this moment in history the weight of the past, the dialectic, has burgeoned to the point that there is hardly a clean haven or defensible bulwark left. Our culture is such a fusion of influences, our material reality such a concatenation of technologies and past events, all creating such a welter of wonder, dissipation and stress, that it is nearly impossible to maintain any strict dogmatic orthodoxy.

At least, if one is self-aware, studying, paying attention..

And honest.


Those of us who are, are all left grasping for some shred of a defense against anomie and nihilism..


This applies particularly to the Church, to the Christian Faith, today.


The moderns (Nietzsche** & Company) came and declared it all false and spent.

But they were themselves deriving their energy from it, even as it seemed to them to die.


All of human history can be characterized as one great search for meaning. Great material cultures have been repeatedly created, technological revolutions exploiting then exhausting the "material" environment, elaborate metaphysical semantic (spiritual) edifices constructed, only for them each (again, and again and again) to reach a certain point of decadence where they collapse.

We are no different.


The great genius of the human race is that we never stop constructing these great systems of meaning, expressed both in matter and thought..

It is our defining characteristic as a species. We are narrative, we are our knowledge, our stories, our understanding.


This is perhaps maladroitly put. I hope you understand what I am trying to say.


I just want to state immediately on this blog that I understand that we have problems. I think I have a bead on the nature of the crisis we face, especially in the shape it has taken in the Catholic Church.


The reason I am writing this is because I think that there are worthwhile things to be said, and that the tradition is still vibrant.


They have called it "the end of history." But they are wrong.

It is not spent, not yet.


There is still blood in these arteries, yet vitality in these veins.


If what I believe is true truly is, then in all humility we will find our way.



This is no salvage operation. This is a restoration.

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[** I'll merely point out, in keeping with my ironic tangent at the end of the prior post, that both Nietzsche and Darwin - "apostles of atheism" as some would have them - were sons of preachermen. Nietzsche's father a Lutheran minister, Darwin of a long line of Anglican divines.. Which is just to say they knew intimately what they were revolting against, because she - "La Grande Pute" - had whelped and weaned them.]



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