Dynamist Blog

FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE

Someone who has either read or read about one or both of my books, and who obviously has the benefits of an elite education, writes:

I must confess that I--though a gay man (and actively resisting sexist/homophobic construction of my body)--find your views disturbing but not at all surprising.

In the mid to late 90's the market was already reaping the rewards of a Faustian bargain made with it by the humanities at institutions of higher learning. Post-structuralisms and Post-modernisms purportedly concerned with liberating the material world (Plato's nurse) and the aesthetic from the bondage of the spiritual and the rational (de)sensitized legions of young persons who would graduate from "vaunted" institutions only to take positions in new media consulting or creative side ad work. The ploy was readily apparent even if progressives have been characteristically slow to accept the challenge to salvage progressive alliances actively wrecked by thinking such as yours (thinking and praxis that creates divides between gender/sexuality and class/race; dynamism--as it were--can be destructive if we understand it as a human conceptual or political tool capable of worse and better use and not as some natural state as Globalization seems to want us to hold).

I wish there were more Reinhold Niebuhrs in the world and more feminists as opposed to Queer Theorists. However, I fear not because the current circumstances may very well change....

I think you might fail to consider that religious progressives might finally awaken from their decades long slumber to answer the call against idolatry. One can cherish the "feminine" without relying on post-capitalist constructions of the "feminine" to acknowledge the embodiedness of gender. One can be LGBT friendly without becoming a materialist or a vulgar libertarian.

An Augustinian concept of proper use of tools (where material goods do not become idols) and a Puritan (and Jewish) reverence for a transcendent reality that casts doubt on the goodness of our actions is so strongly a part of our national culture that I do not think your vision is ultimately tenable.

It is true that the Manichean distinction of "right" and "left" no longer captures the political scene. Progressive religionists are recognizing this and will continue to make it harder for vulgar libertarians to categorize all religion as fully traditionalist, dolefully static and undynamic. In other words, the progressive churches and allies from other faith traditions are working very hard to create political connections between economic justice and social liberty (the very thing religion has often denied women and sexual minorities).

Why do people write like this?

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