Impressive. Through some stray links at the WordPress forums, I wondered into a group of young (post?)evangelicals talking about pluralism and postmodernism in a most helpful way.
The two terms offered up for discussion are metanarrative and meganarrative. Metanarrative come from Quebecois philosopher Francois Lyotard, who defined postmodernity as “incredulity toward metanarratives.” What does that garble mean? “I don’t believe any Big Story is capable of being The Story to End All Stories.” This doesn’t (necessarily) mean that Story A can’t be better than Story B when it comes to talking about Situation X. But it does mean that you can’t claim Story A is The Story to End All Stories.
Then there are meganarratives, a new term to me. Justin at Radical Congruency offers this: “This is a big story that’s worth being a part of, because it’s going somewhere.” A meganarrative offers a big enough story to settle down it yet it open enough to embrace other stories. Justin imagines that society would be fine with Christians who told their story like this, and I can’t help but agree. Click to continue reading “To tell the old, old story”
Robots have a right to protest too. And, now we know, the gumption to do it too. Following the ever masculine General J.C. Christian, Patriot, I call for an immediate robot protest advocating the release of millions of spermatozoan-Americans from their frozen captivity in sperm banks across America.
Anybody with me? Who wants to picket? (I’ll make some signs that say “Pak! Chooie! Umf!“)
Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit says that a decent institution is one that doesn’t humiliate people. Besides the obvious point about US indencency in Abu Ghraib, there is also the case of the United Methodist Church (my former home). Can a denomination littered with conferences which hold the open secret of “punishment parishes” not be said to humiliate, not only the clergy it appoints to these churches but more importantly the members of those parishes?
Have you heard? It’s no longer Abu Ghraib—that was the bad place. Now it’s been renamed Camp Redemption. You wouldn’t want to deny Iraqis redemption , would you?
9/11 pariah Susan Sontag had this to say in a recent Guardian:
You ask yourself how someone can grin at the sufferings and humiliation of another human being – drag a naked Iraqi man along the floor with a leash? set guard dogs at the genitals and legs of cowering, naked prisoners? rape and sodomise prisoners? force shackled hooded prisoners to masturbate or commit sexual acts with each other? beat prisoners to death? – and feel naive in asking the questions, since the answer is, self-evidently: people do these things to other people. Not just in Nazi concentration camps and in Abu Ghraib when it was run by Saddam Hussein. Americans, too, do them when they have permission. When they are told or made to feel that those over whom they have absolute power deserve to be mistreated, humiliated, tormented. They do them when they are led to believe that the people they are torturing belong to an inferior, despicable race or religion. For the meaning of these pictures is not just that these acts were performed, but that their perpetrators had no sense that there was anything wrong in what the pictures show. Even more appalling, since the pictures were meant to be circulated and seen by many people, it was all fun. And this idea of fun is, alas, more and more – contrary to what Mr Bush is telling the world – part of “the true nature and heart of America”.
From Mother Jones, a piece on the importance of waging story, not critique.
