Daily Archives: December 17, 2009

You’re not “post-” anything, so shut the hell up!

If there was one term I could actually effect a moratorium on I think it would have to be the phrase “post-”. But, since I can’t effect a moratorium, allow me to propose an axiom instead:

Any conceptual position (theological, philosophical, etc.) that describes itself using the modifier “post-” is never actually “post-” anything in anything other than a temporal sense (and usually that’s not the case either).

Postmetaphysical? No. Postfoundationalist? No, you were never foundationalist to start with. Postliberal? No, you’re still liberal. Postmodern? Shut the fuck up, that’s just stupid. Post-postmodern? Kneecaps, meet baseball bat.

The only possible places where I can think of the term “post-” having any real usefulness are in the realms of architecture and art history. Insofar as it gets used by philosophers and theologians its just an attempt to short circuit an argument by pretending that the views you are attacking were a developmental stage you  went through when you were young and not quite as well read as you obviously are now. To call any view “post-” anything is just a masquerade alloying one to define your adversary as wrong, arcane, and naive from the outset.

In short, adopting the language of “post-” is unforgivably cheap and masks a lack of ability to actually make good arguments against things you want to criticize.

EP Responds to Obama’s Nobel Speech

The Ekklesia Project has launched a new blog in response to President Obama’s recent Nobel Prize acceptance speech. I think this is a good thing. EP came into existence to call into question Christians’ complicity with violence as such and war in particular. That was something of an easy target during the Bush years and many Christians of the EP persuasion voted enthusiastically for Obama (including Stanley Hauerwas, who has a response to the speech up on the blog). At any rate, I appreciate that Obama is not being given a pass on his escalation of the war on terror by EP. He should not be given one.

Also does anyone else find it interesting that so many people like Hauerwas who built careers around taking down Niebuhrianism voted for Obama who is by far the most articulate exponent of Niebuhrianism to occupy the White House in decades? This came up in the comments on Hauerwas’s post and I think its quite an ironic point. But, that being said I’m glad EP is not letting go of their convictions on the basis of “Yeay, not Bush!”

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