#post-modernity

The Culture of Interpretation The Culture of Interpretation, Roger Lundin. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. (ISBN: 9780802806369) 1993. Summary: A study of contemporary American culture, how we’ve come to this point, and its implications for Christians. This is one of those books I came to thirty years too late. In the time since, the author has passed on (in 2015). But the matters he addresses,…

"[I]t is important to differentiate between the postmodern and the post-postmodern because the postmodern is centered on rebellion, progressive social movements, tension, and confict, while the post-postmodern is focused on escaping tension and confict through the easy access to pleasure."

— Robert Samuels, Generation X and the Rise of the Entertainment Subject (2021)

"The essence of the philosophical thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, together with the increasing power of the scientific-technological apparatus, has brought the omnipotent domination of technology over every aspect of human life. ... Filling up the void sky after God’s death, technology, however, does not offer any particular frame of meaning, its goals being just to expand infinitely the potential to reach goals and to function." — "The quest for meaning after the end of meaning: An epochal rupture" (2014)

"On one side, we have human beings, with their beliefs, and acute need of frames of meaning, while on the other, the world they inhabit has long ago become fatherless, godless, frameless, limitless, technological, and functional. This gap may be dramatically and painfully reduced when a limit suddenly appears, for instance in the form of an unexpected or premature death, a heavily disabling illness, the loss of someone important, an insight into our extreme vulnerability, or some acute or ongoing traumatic experience.  These are the moments when an individual may find him- or herself utterly unarmed, and devoid of any tools to face and to cope with these limits. The illusory curtain of a seemingly eternal, safe, and entertained life is miserably torn into pieces, and the threat of darkness blatantly appears in the most devastating ways. [...] As a matter of fact, since its birth, porn has been entwined with the topic of breaking the limits, those of morality and of common decency in primis.  By its very existence, porn immediately started challenging, trespassing, and moving these limits forward, since the first pictures and movies of the nineteenth century.  Interestingly enough, this was made possible only thanks to women who happened to live abundantly beyond those limits, being in most cases prostitutes. [...] Actually, to deny limits has become the rule, thus porn cannot any longer represent a transgression. A very interesting and important point, in this regard, is to acknowledge that the progressive denial of limits in heterosexual porn pertains mainly women, and can be reached only if, when, and how women allow it to happen." — Lost Goddesses, "Porn and no limits" (2018)

Is bourgeois society the decline of civilization?

Nietzsche said the newspaper had replaced the prayer in the life of the modern bourgeois, meaning that the busy, the cheap, the ephemeral, had usurped all that remained of the eternal in his daily life. ~ Allan Bloom By German Gorraiz Lopez© The Radical Outlook Hermann Hesse in his book “The Steppenwolf” (Der Steppenwolf, 1927), captures the feeling of anguish, hopelessness, and bewilderment…

The WISEA J171227.81-232210.7 black hole — several billion times as massive as our sun, exploding in Ophiuchus galaxy cluster,

Claude Lévi-Strauss is a good representative of contemporary thought. He displays its salient characteristics: despair of thought, insignificance of being, erection of non-knowledge as the ultimate “knowledge”, universal doubt (doubt of meaning and doubt of doubt…