Wednesday, March 15, 2006

More on C. S. Lewis, modernity, and postmodernity

I've been reading C. S. Lewis a lot over these last few weeks (people who know me fairly well would be surprised that I ever stopped, but I'd actually taken a pretty long hiatus from reading his works), and it amazes me how pertinent his works are to the current discussions of postmodernism in the church. For all his criticism of moral subjectivism and epistemological pessimism, which would appear to peg him as thoroughly "modern," he consistently distinguishes his own position from the kind of idolatrous objectivity for which modernity has been rightly criticized. Sanity is relevant in any age--and it's nice to hear it from other ages, to keep (as Lewis said in his introduction to Athanasius's On the Incarnation) "the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds."

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