In this eloquent guide to the meanings of the postmodern era, Albert Borgmann charts the options before us as we seek alternatives to the joyless and artificial culture of consumption. Borgmann connects the fundamental ideas driving his understanding of society's ills to every sphere of contemporary social life, and goes beyond the language of postmodern discourse to offer a powerfully articulated vision of what this new era, at its best, has in store. "[This] thoughtful book is the first remotely realistic map out of the post modern labyrinth."—Joseph Coates, The Chicago Tribune "Rather astoundingly large-minded vision of the nature of humanity, civilization and science."—Kirkus Reviews

This book attempts to identify a central problem within the North American evangelical imagination around the issue of religious experience and its relationship to the basic hermeneutical stance of biblical and theological interpretation. The relatively recent emergence of the academic discipline of Christian spirituality offers a new set of methodological insights that may help to mediate the theological impasse between more conservative and progressive perspectives concerning the appropriate role of human experience for evangelical thought and practice. Specifically, we will explore the experience of religious conversion that lies at the center of evangelical spirituality in critical dialogue with the challenges and opportunities brought about by recent philosophical discourse and the postmodern turn, variously understood.

The intellectual development of American legal thought has progressed remarkably quickly form the nation's founding through today. Stephen Feldman traces this development through the lens of broader intellectual movements and in this work applies the concepts of premodernism, modernism, and postmodernism to legal thought, using examples or significant cases from Supreme Court history. Comprehensive and accessible, this single volume provides an overview of the evolution of American legal thought up to the present.

This is the first bibliography of Postmodernism to take account of work published in all subject areas and in all languages. Deborah Madsen has identified a new first occurrence of the term in 1926, preceding by more than twenty years the first occurence documented by the Oxford English Dictionary. In a chronological listing, books, articles, notes, letters and working papers on Postmodernism are described with full bibliographical details. Reviews of major books are documented and full contents listings are given for special issues of journals devoted to Postmodernism. An appendix includes books on Postmodernism announced for publication in 1995. This bibliography brings together in one place all secondary material published on Postmodernism. All disciplines are included, from anthropology to zoology: architecture, cultural studies, dance, drama, feminism, fiction, geography, history, legal studies, literary theory, mathematics, medicine, music, pedagogical theory, philosophy, photography and film, poetry, politics, religion, sociology, the visual and plastic arts, and others. The bibliography also documents items in a range of languages other than English: Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Slovanian, Spanish, and the Scandinavian languages. Access to the information contained in the bibliography is made easy with a comprehensive index providing guidance according to author, subject, language, and key words. Postmodernism: A Bibliography, 1926-1994 is an essential reference text for anyone working in the area of contemporary culture studies.

We are living in an emerging technoculture. Machines and gadgets not only weave the fabric of daily life, but more importantly embody philosophical and religious values which shape the contemporary moral vision-a vision that is often at odds with Christian convictions. This book critically examines those values, and offers a framework for how Christian moral theology should be formed and lived-out within the emerging technoculture. Brent Waters argues that technology represents the principal cultural background against which contemporary Christian moral life is formed. Addressing contemporary ethical and religious issues, this book will be of particular interest to students and scholars exploring the ideas of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Grant, Arendt, and Borgmann.

Troeltsch's struggle with historicism sets the stage for a proposal that Christology be done from within and from ahead. Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics and Schleiermacher's experiential theology inform a Christology from within that is rooted in tradition and experience, while Pannenberg's notion of proleptic eschatological fulfilment serves as resource for a Christology from ahead. This volume develops a hermeneutical Christology that takes into account the historical contingency of knowledge, and seeks a Christology beyond the objectivism of timeless truth and the relativism of absolutised contextuality. The book is concluded with an examination of the convergence of critical traditionality, experiential appropriation and eschatological prolepsis in the Christology of the apostle Paul. The author explores how Christology might respond to the scandal of universality in postmodernity without defaulting on its claim to transcontextual referentiality.

In Pentecostalism, Postmodernism, and Reformed Epistemology, Yoon Shin critically builds on James K. A. Smith’s postmodern Pentecostal epistemology with the aid of Reformed epistemology. It takes the reader through an interdisciplinary journey that exposits and illumines the relationship among Pentecostal spirituality, continental and analytic philosophy, postliberalism, moral psychology, and philosophy of emotion. This work clarifies misunderstandings of Smith, in Smith, and between continental and analytic epistemology, constructively and coherently synthesizing the sources through interdisciplinary analysis and thereby demonstrating the value of mashup philosophy. The resulting epistemology strengthens the mostly descriptive epistemology of Smith with the warrant criteria of Alvin Plantinga.

Foreword by Howard John Loewen As our lives become complex with the demands of our affluent and accelerating society, do we hear the gospel's timeless and insistent call to live the "obedience of faith"? In these three "sermonic essays" Eldin Villafañe takes on the task of awakening true obedience of faith through the themes of discipleship, incarnation, and justice. Beginning with discipleship, Villafañe draws on the "Christ hymn" of Philippians 2 to challenge Christians to choose the costly Christ-life. He then offers six contrarian perspectives on the incarnation from the early church as correctives to our current, culturally conditioned theological emphases. Finally, taking the book of Amos as a touchstone, Villafañe issues a call for just leadership among the nations. Adding interest and depth to this work are an insightful foreword by Dean Loewen and thoughtful responses by Richard Peace, Juan Francisco Martinez, and Veli-Mattí Kärkkäinen. Villafañe's Beyond Cheap Grace incisively extends Christ's call to discipleship, incarnation, and justice to the church, the academy, and Christian leaders of all traditions.

We all live our daily lives surrounded by the products of technology that make what we do simpler, faster, and more efficient. These are benefits we often just take for granted. But at the same time, as these products disburden us of unwanted tasks that consumed much time and effort in earlier eras, many of them also leave us more disengaged from our natural and even human surroundings. It is the task of what Gene Moriarty calls focal engineering to create products that will achieve a balance between disburdenment and engagement: &“How much disburdenment will be appropriate while still permitting an engagement that enriches one&’s life, elevates the spirit, and calls forth a good life in a convivial society?&” One of his examples of a focally engineered structure is the Golden Gate Bridge, which &“draws people to it, enlivens and elevates the human spirit, and resonates with the world of its congenial setting. Humans, bridge, and world are in tune.&” These values of engagement, enlivenment, and resonance are key to the normative approach Moriarty brings to the profession of engineering, which traditionally has focused mainly on technical measures of evaluation such as efficiency, productivity, objectivity, and precision. These measures, while important, look at the engineered product in a local and limited sense. But &“from a broader perspective, what is locally benign may present serious moral problems,&” undermining &“social justice, environmental sustainability, and health and safety of affected parties.&” It is this broader perspective that is championed by focal engineering, the subject of Part III of the book, which Moriarty contrasts with &“modern&” engineering in Part I and &“pre-modern&” engineering in Part II.

One critical change in how people work, argues Larry Hirschhorn, is that they are expected to bring more of themselves psychologically to the job. To facilitate this change, it is necessary to create a new culture of authority—one in which superiors acknowledge their dependence on subordinates, subordinates can challenge superiors, and both are able to show their vulnerability. For many companies, the past decade has been marked by a sense of turbulence and redefinition. The growing role of information technologies and service businesses has prompted companies to reconsider how they are structured and even what business they are in. These changes have also affected how people work, what skills they need, and what kind of careers they expect. One critical change in how people work, argues Larry Hirschhorn, is that they are expected to bring more of themselves psychologically to the job. To facilitate this change, it is necessary to create a new culture of authority—one in which superiors acknowledge their dependence on subordinates, subordinates can challenge superiors, and both are able to show their vulnerability. In the old culture of authority, people suppressed disruptive feelings such as envy, resentment, and fear of dependency. But by depersonalizing themselves, they became "alienated"; in the process, the work of the organization suffered. In building a new culture of authority, we are challenged to express these feelings without disrupting our work. We learn how to bring our feelings to our tasks. The first chapters of the book examine the covert processes by which people caught between the old and new culture of authority neither suppress nor express their feelings. Feelings are activated but not directed toward useful work. The case studies of this process are instructive and moving. The book then explores how organizations can create a culture of openness in which people become more psychologically present. In part, the process entails an understanding of the changes taking place in how we experience our own identity at work and that of "others" in society at large. To do this, the book suggests, we need a social policy of forgiveness and second chances.