Saturday, May 22, 2004

From Mars Hill Audio.

"[I]t could be argued that the world of humane good sense, clarity and peace promised by modernity, if only we let go of God, has not been forthcoming. Natural science has turned out to be dumb with regard to values and ends for which it supplies the means in ever more astonishing, if troubling, abundance. The social sciences, far from explaining everything, have no convincing rationale for themselves except as successive rhetorics of power and control and are therefore pathways to nihilism. It should trouble us that one of the greatest successes of the so-called collapse of totalizing meta-narratives or of any attempts to establish truth, meaning and value is the production of the ideal late-capitalist consumer, whose objectives stretch no further than acquiring something, reducing it to rubbish, and going on to the next desirable commodity."

--Janet Martin Soskice, "All That Is," a review of David Bentley Hart's

The Beauty of the Infinite, in Times Literary Supplement, April 9,

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