The Mountain and the River: Genesis, Postmodernism, and the Machine

Western civilization is at a precarious crossroad. It relies on objectivity of truth and of right and wrong, a first principle until about the turn of the twentieth century. But in more recent years postmodern ideas of truth-formation began to gain traction, and Christianity lost its grip on Western cultures in favor of secular ideologies. The result has been the bloodiest century in human history, and the accelerated proliferation of oppressive ideologies. Postmodern critiques during this time have become general in the culture, like a virus escaped from the lab. 


We live this life in the body conscious of a vaguely felt lack of completeness. We may describe it as "alienation," leaving open-ended what about us is being alienated from what. The Genesis worldview tells us the alienation is a natural condition of our existence, unfortunately. It is the result of our moral agency and our two-nature, spiritual and material essence: we are dust-formed but also God-breathed. If we reject the Genesis worldview, the sense of alienation does not go away, and so we grope around trying to explain it. Hence postmodern theory.  


This book is about the chasm between the Genesis worldview, and that of postmodernism. The differences are not merely competing truth claims, but competing claims about how truth is formed in the first place. And not only truth, but right and wrong, and even beauty. Where do these ideals originate, and why do we struggle so much now in our pursuit of them? There is an answer, and we can find our way to it by rejecting disastrous flirtations with postmodernist critique and negation, to recover individual human dignity, and freedom, and even a renewed sense of brotherhood by appeal to universal values even in our differences.


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The Mountain and the River: Genesis, Postmodernism, and the Machine

Western civilization is at a precarious crossroad. It relies on objectivity of truth and of right and wrong, a first principle until about the turn of the twentieth century. But in more recent years postmodern ideas of truth-formation began to gain traction, and Christianity lost its grip on Western cultures in favor of secular ideologies. The result has been the bloodiest century in human history, and the accelerated proliferation of oppressive ideologies. Postmodern critiques during this time have become general in the culture, like a virus escaped from the lab. 


We live this life in the body conscious of a vaguely felt lack of completeness. We may describe it as "alienation," leaving open-ended what about us is being alienated from what. The Genesis worldview tells us the alienation is a natural condition of our existence, unfortunately. It is the result of our moral agency and our two-nature, spiritual and material essence: we are dust-formed but also God-breathed. If we reject the Genesis worldview, the sense of alienation does not go away, and so we grope around trying to explain it. Hence postmodern theory.  


This book is about the chasm between the Genesis worldview, and that of postmodernism. The differences are not merely competing truth claims, but competing claims about how truth is formed in the first place. And not only truth, but right and wrong, and even beauty. Where do these ideals originate, and why do we struggle so much now in our pursuit of them? There is an answer, and we can find our way to it by rejecting disastrous flirtations with postmodernist critique and negation, to recover individual human dignity, and freedom, and even a renewed sense of brotherhood by appeal to universal values even in our differences.


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The Mountain and the River: Genesis, Postmodernism, and the Machine

The Mountain and the River: Genesis, Postmodernism, and the Machine

by Albert Norton
The Mountain and the River: Genesis, Postmodernism, and the Machine

The Mountain and the River: Genesis, Postmodernism, and the Machine

by Albert Norton

eBook

$11.99 

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Overview

Western civilization is at a precarious crossroad. It relies on objectivity of truth and of right and wrong, a first principle until about the turn of the twentieth century. But in more recent years postmodern ideas of truth-formation began to gain traction, and Christianity lost its grip on Western cultures in favor of secular ideologies. The result has been the bloodiest century in human history, and the accelerated proliferation of oppressive ideologies. Postmodern critiques during this time have become general in the culture, like a virus escaped from the lab. 


We live this life in the body conscious of a vaguely felt lack of completeness. We may describe it as "alienation," leaving open-ended what about us is being alienated from what. The Genesis worldview tells us the alienation is a natural condition of our existence, unfortunately. It is the result of our moral agency and our two-nature, spiritual and material essence: we are dust-formed but also God-breathed. If we reject the Genesis worldview, the sense of alienation does not go away, and so we grope around trying to explain it. Hence postmodern theory.  


This book is about the chasm between the Genesis worldview, and that of postmodernism. The differences are not merely competing truth claims, but competing claims about how truth is formed in the first place. And not only truth, but right and wrong, and even beauty. Where do these ideals originate, and why do we struggle so much now in our pursuit of them? There is an answer, and we can find our way to it by rejecting disastrous flirtations with postmodernist critique and negation, to recover individual human dignity, and freedom, and even a renewed sense of brotherhood by appeal to universal values even in our differences.



Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781943003822
Publisher: New English Review Press dba Wrld Encounter Inst
Publication date: 06/06/2023
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 320
File size: 1 MB

About the Author

ALBERT NORTON, JR. is a writer and attorney working in the American South. He is author of Dangerous God: A Defense of Transcendent Truth (2021) concerning formation of truth and values in a postmodern age; and Intuition of Significance, a 2020 work weighing the merits of theism against materialism. He is also the author of several award-winning short stories, and two novels: Another Like Me (2015) and Rough Water Baptism (2017), on themes of navigating reality in a post-Christian world.

Table of Contents

Contents



Introduction  11


1 - Crisis of Meaning  15


2 - In the Beginning  26


3 - Formless and Void  36


4 - What is Reality?   45


5 - Form and Hierarchy   60


6 - Mythos and Logos    69


7 - Male and Female  79

 

8 - Sexuality  90

 

9 - Sex Differences  98


10 - Good and Evil 107


11 - Postmodernism 116


12 - Dialectic 130


13 - Alterity 137


14 - Hermeneutics of Suspicion 149


15 - Structuralism 160


16 - Frankfurt School 171


17 - Sexual Revolution 183


18 - Process and Flow 198


19 - Life Force 208


20 - Individualism and Socialism 216


21 - Pragmatism 228


22 - Democracy 238


23 - Metanarrative 247


24 - The Machine 257


25 - Liberal to Illiberal 266


26 - Coercion 275


27 - Marx, Still 283

 

28 - Collapse 293


29 - Rebirth 301


Glossary 305

 

Bibliography 319


Index 329

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