Oooo. Oooo. Oooo!

I'm more excited than Arnold Horshack. All of the conference messages from the 2006 Annual Desiring God Conference are available as free downloads here! The theme for this year's conference (which I wish I'd gone to) was The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World. Thanks to the New Attitude blog for causing the hands up response!

Hmm. I wonder what my deal is with Welcome Back, Kotter these days...? Weird.

Comments

[Jeff Noble]

Provocative thought, and while part of me leans toward saying, "That's exactly what that means," the other part of me advises diplomacy.

There are some genuine futurists - pretty heady folks out there in the Christian advance - who have taken the term postmodern and advanced it beyond what it was coined for in the 60s.

In fact, the "postmodern" conversation in Christianity began way before it did in popular culture. It surfaced and was called liberalism in the late 1800s into the 1920s.

The "fundamentalists" called themselves that as a form of distinctive pride; they felt they were establishing their beliefs upon the fundamentals of the faith. However, it's apparent from reading that they were more reactive than open to conversing with opposing viewpoints. They felt that liberals as they loved to call them, were deconstructing the faith handed down from ages past, diluting and dissolving it.

The same conversation has resurfaced today, with much the same response. How to do ministry in a changing world? What is sacred and what is secular? What can be adapted and what can be adopted without aborting the truth of the gospel?

[Mark W.]

It's quite interesting how the American Christian community in the past few years has suddenly awakened to and has began using the "used-to-be startling" buzzword - "postmodernism," especially since postmodernism has been officially recognized since at least the 1960s. The movement is now considered dead in academia, though we are still seeing some of its effects in pop-culture. Does this mean that most Christian thinkers are "pop-culture" (read "low culture") and simply reactive instead of dynamic? Tough question, I know.