Religion and Postmodernity

Religion and Postmodernity

Introduction

Postmodernism literally means “after Modernism.” In the contemporary literature, the term often denotes the cultural phase following Modernism or a heterogeneous, unorganized intellectual movement challenging Modernism. It is a term that designates a turning point, a rupture from the past, and the phenomenon of encountering a new cultural, historical, and social realm. Harding (2003) mentions throughout its history, Postmodernism has gained divergent meanings and has become a subject of long-lasting disputes in art, architecture, literature, theology, geography, anthropology, philosophy, history, and all other branches of social sciences, among other disciplines (Harding, 2003). This paper discusses religion and postmodernity in a concise and comprehensive way.

Religion and Postmodernity: A Discussion

Postmodernism is an abstract, theoretical term and should be distinguished from postmodernity, which describes a sociological or cultural climate. The term postmodernism was coined in the late 1940s by British historian Arnold Toynbee, but used in the mid-1970s by the American art critic and theorist Charles Jencks to describe contemporary antimodernist movements like Pop art, Concept Art, and Postminimalism. Jean-François Lyotard, in his book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979) was one of the first thinkers to write extensively about postmodernism as a wider cultural phenomenon. He viewed it as coming both before and after modernism, the reverse side of it (Harding, 2003). As such, postmodern moments have subsequently been discerned in thinkers as various as the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, and the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

For Lyotard, the postmodern is characterized by an incredulity towards metanarratives. By metanarratives he means the appeal to explanatory principles that presume to tell the story of the ways things are. Metanarrratives are accounts of the origin, foundations, and formations of the various forms of human knowledge: for example, motion (Isaac Newton), the mind (René Descartes and Immanuel Kant), history (George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel), the economy (Karl Marx), psychology (Sigmund Freud), and society (Emile Durkheim). Metanarratives assume the world and human activity within it can be known as a whole because it is rational and organized according to certain universal and verifiable laws or principles. Postmodernism announces a radical scepticism towards such universalism and the objectivity or view from no where that is presupposed in investigations into and accounts of these foundational laws or principles. Postmodernity, then, would describe a cultural situation in which such scepticism was culturally dominant. In such a time, the postmodern would not just be a theoretical critique of modernity's rational understanding of the world and the universalism of that reasoning. The postmodern would be an attempt to rethink and experience the world according to that antifoundationalism and the turn towards local knowledges or views from a specific standpoints: gendered knowledges, ethnic knowledges, religious knowledges, for example (Longino, 2002).

The postmodern world is composed of little other than grand narratives, accounts of knowledge that are aware they are partial in nature, refracted through a certain cultural perspective and constructed. Their constructedness is important, specifically when attempting to assess the impact ...