One of the major ideas that I hope to begin incoporating into this site is a discussio of ways that I can integrate one major sphere of my life (intellectual pursuits) with another major sphere (my faith). The problem with this is that members of one sphere all label the members of the other sphere as dogmatic, unthinking, self-centered, political brutes.
The additional problem is that, in general, they are both right. I have written before on the ways that some theorists of the public intellectual, Nancy Fraser mostly, feel that in order to have a truly discursive society, we need to acknowledge and embrace an idea of the public that includes multiple publics which also integrate some aspects of what has typically been called the private sphere (made up of sexual, familial, and personal religious belief.)
In order to accomplish this feat, members of both of my sample spheres (I have many other groups that I self-associate with, but that would only complicate things much further) need to recognize that they both are behaving with a degree of negative dogmatics that they both criticize in the other group. Unfortunately, if history is any guide, the only way to resolve these tensions is some sort of violence, whether political, ideological, or rhetorical.
So the task for those of us (read, "me") who negotiate these intersections is to limit the trauma caused to the necessary for the task while at the same time retaining the sense that we respect the ability of those whom we disagree with to hold the beliefs with which we disagree.
One way that this comes out is in small arenas like the blog to which my friends and I contribute. (Society for the Reflective Consumption of Media) Recently, one of my friends, Brad, wrote a piece of literary review/criticism that used Madeline L' Engle to talk about the ways in which Art, as a modern concept, owes a significant debt and connection to a certain understanding of Christian Art.
The problem arose when one of the founders of the site found that the title and obvious Christian perspective of the article too preachy. Dan claimed that while he supported discussions of faith in an abstract sense as a necessary aspect of someone's life, he did not want to be preached at. While as someone who has been preached at from the Left and the Right for most of his life, I understand this inclination, I also understand the philosophical difficulty in allowing one group to police the definition of something like "preaching"
In larger perspectives, like the classroom as a teacher or student, we have to negotiate these ideas constantly. Am I preaching at my students when I present a form of written expression like the essay as the standard for educational expression. In some ways, I am adopting a ideological stance that is similar in form and presentation to another person standing up and saying that they believe that Jesus is the son of God.
yes, I know that there are radical differences in the passions attached to the essay versus the foundations of the Christian faith. Few people would choose to be tortured and die for their belief that the essay with synthesized sources is the correctly dominant form of academic communication. Still, both of these beliefs involve a level of attachment of the individual to a particular institutional tradition.
Therefore, when we present ourselves within these spheres, we need to recognize the connections, obligations, and biases that we bring with us from academic as well as religious traditions. The importance of thinkers like Foucault to a Christian intellectual such as myself is that they present ways of looking at the history of thought that places all discourses within a framework of tradition, power, and history.
Did I just say that an academic such as Foucault was important to a Christian? Yes. Yes, I did. That should give us enough to think about for today. I will probably elaborate on this connection between Postmodern thinkers and my placement within the border space between these spheres at a later point, but for now, that is all.
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