Psychologist Brewster Smith decries the solvents of postmodern life - cynicism, shallowness, sensationalism, warfare between fundamentalisms and relativisms, uncertainty about all standards, the “fin de siecle sense of drift and doom” (even after the fin). What’s his solution? Find yourself a community that can give you values, standards, a heritage, moral conherence, a sense of social responsiblity. As Walter Truett Anderson remarks, “It’s amazing how strongly the fashion has shifted - about 180 degrees from the celebrating of inner-directed individualism, the condemnation of conformity, that was mainstream thinking among liberal intellectuals only a few decades ago. Today the same kind of people condemn individualism and celebrate life in the bosom of a community, a kind of life that can be lived only by conforming to the community’s norms and values.”
Peter Leithart
Peter J. Leithart is President of Theopolis Institute. He is the author of numerous books on theology, literature, and culture, including Theopolitan, Defending Constantine, and Baptized Body.
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