It Ain't About the Prostate Clinic

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Yes, yes, yes, a million times, YES! Read this article. Read it now.

Why Are There Never Enough Parking Spaces at the Prostate Clinic?

An excerpt, to whet the appetite of discerning individuals, and to turn off readers who’d rather find out who’s left on Survivor:

As the Left lost itself in a morass of micronarratives and identity politics, it lost its ability to speak with any authority about things that matter; indeed, it lost its ability even to see the things that matter. The universities that should have been centres of serious discussion of things that really matter descended into trivia, losing sight of the basics of politics in an arcane mass of rebarbative theoretical gobbledigook, Gnostic vocabulary, and utter trivia. Ph.Ds reflecting on the oppression of the poor came to be replaced with dissertations on cybersex, foot fetishists, and, no doubt at some point, the semiotic importance of Tom Jones impersonators. The margins became central; the centre, unable to hold, was thrust to the margins; and the Left became an irrelevance to changing the things that really matter.

As this postmodern ethos has bled into Christian theology, a similar theological disempowerment has become evident. What began as a healthy concern to contextualize theology led in many cases to theologies where the particulars of context (whether geographical, social, political, ethnic, gender, sexual orientation etc. etc.) effectively trumped the universal horizon of scripture. The perfect storm of anarchic postmodern philosophies, identity politics, hyperspecialisation and fragmentation of the theological discipline, fear of cultural irrelevance, and the eclectic mindset of the consumer have combined to create a situation where the particular rules, messiness is in, and the church is little more than a cacophony of competing voices (or, to use the trendy and pretentious terminology, `dissonant vocalities’). On every corner, huckster theologians who have made their careers out of creating this mess are selling you the problem as if it is the solution, and theology now abounds with Orwellian newspeak: chaos is order; contradiction is consistency; valueless trivia is vital truth. And the Christian culture vultures are at the cutting-edge of this, with their focus on the particular and the peripheral rather than the universal and the central. Kids’ stuff – teenflicks and sex and the internet – holds centre stage in so much Christian cultural conversation, perhaps a sign of the West’s obsession with all things adolescent, perhaps a sign of the permanent adolescence of many of the interlocutors. And let’s face it, no-one ever loses in today’s evangelical market by backing the peripheral rather than the central, or by overestimating the triviality of the tastes of the Western Christian consumer. Is a Christian bookstore going to make money selling a book on the Incarnation or on prayer, or one on Christian approaches to body image, or The Simpsons, or how to improve your sex life?

And to answer one final question, yes, I guess the guy is British, or at least Canadian, because he uses “s” in a lot of places where normal people use “z”. So deal with it…

4 Comments

  1. Flash McDirt on January 7, 2009 at 6:58 am

    Uh, Survivor was on THURSDAY nights, but the season ended last month, and the new season doesn’t start until February 12, again on Thursday nights.

    • Byron on January 7, 2009 at 11:13 am

      Which tells you everything you need to know about my interest in/knowledge of Survivor.

  2. Graham on January 10, 2009 at 8:07 am

    Normal people use “z”?

    • Byron on January 10, 2009 at 8:33 am

      Spoken like a true Brit.

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