Friends,
My spiritual interests and concerns have led me in a particular direction, which I am pursuing at my new blog: Machines4Living.com. I have come to the conclusion that modernity has alienated man from his authentic self to such an extent that spiritual growth is unnecessarily difficult. This isn't a novel idea, of course. I came to this conclusion a couple years ago when reading Pastor Frazee's The Connecting Church while taking philosophy courses at Catholic University of America. Unlike many Catholic and Straussian thinkers (whose responses seek a premodern revival) and many liberal and emergent thinkers (whose responses appeal to postmodernism), I see the only possible, realistic response as lying in a development within modernism itself. While this is not a fashionable position (and many will find the mission statement below to be decidedly unfashionable) I'm reminded of a question that Dr Richard Velkley once asked, "If modernity is so bad, then what accounts for its appeal?".
The mission statement of Machines4Living.com is copied below.
For centuries, we've designed systems that alienate us from ourselves,
from community, from the flow of life and our natural desire to do
good. With the convergence of the digital and physical worlds, we live
in a designed world. We can redesign it to be smarter, more efficient,
and responsive to our natural lives and processes. Just as modernists
called a house “a machine for living in”, so today all systems must be
redesigned as machines for living.
Hi Ken,
"I see the only possible, realistic response as lying in a development within modernism itself."
Interestingly, Vatican II in the interpretation of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. subscribes to this too. There is a book by George Weigel on John Paul II which shows this clearly.
Posted by: Daniel Novotny | September 11, 2009 at 04:29 AM