2016 Workshop Talk | 1:08:31 | All Grade Levels, Culture & Faith
Summary
This presentation will complete the ideas presented yesterday.
Yesterday’s Speech: The Aesthetics of Incarnation: A Christian Response to Postmodernism
The rise and (at least in the academy) triumph of postmodern thought over the last half-century has led to the death of language: not language as a practical tool for communication, but language as a vehicle for higher meanings, transcendent ideals, and absolute truths. The breakdown of signifier and signified hailed by Derrida has left language, and the arts in general, powerless to embody the kinds of truths that have lain at the heart of orthodox Christianity„indeed, have questioned the very existence and possibility of such truths. Although it should have been the role of the Church to resist this breakdown of language, our seminaries, schooled on Enlightenment thought„with its artificial dichotomies of fact/fiction, history/myth, science/poetry, reason/ faith„have too often played right into the hands of the postmoderns. Protestants in particular, with their tendency toward iconoclasm on the one hand and a narrow, positivistic, mathematically-defined understanding of the inerrancy of Scripture on the other, have helped to hasten a mindset that is not only detrimental to the arts but that threatens the central mystery of the Gospels: the Incarnation. It will be the burden of this talk to fashion an aesthetics of incarnation, one that will not only speak to the potential of the arts to bear a heavy weight of meaning but that will champion the arts as a far greater friend than foe to the beleaguered Christian living in a postmodern world. The presentation will be broken into two parts. First, I shall discuss the threat to meaning posed both by modernism (structuralism) and postmodernism (deconstruction) and the failure of the Church to answer that threat. Second, I shall look to the history of the Church for traces of a lost aesthetics of incarnation in AugustineÍs focus on the allegorical meaning of Scripture…
Speaker
Louis Markos holds a BA in English and history from Colgate University and an MA and PhD in English from the University of Michigan. He is a professor of English and scholar in residence at Houston Baptist University, where he teaches courses on British romantic and Victorian poetry and prose, the classics, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, and film. Dr. Markos holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities and teaches classes on ancient Greece and Rome for HBU’s Honors College. He is the author of nine books: From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics; Pressing Forward: Alfred, Lord Tennyson and the Victorian Age; The Eye of the Beholder: How to See the World Like a Romantic Poet; Lewis Agonistes: How C. S. Lewis Can Train Us to Wrestle with the Modern and Postmodern World; Apologetics for the 21st Century; Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C. S. Lewis; Literature: A StudentÍs Guide; On the Shoulders of Hobbits: …
Additional Materials
The Association of Classical & Christian Schools presents Repairing the Ruins, the ACCS annual conference, copyright ACCS. You may make additional copies of this recording for use by your school but please do not sell any copies of the recording, or post it on the internet.
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