Interesting article by Tim Keller on the Gospel Coalition blog:

“In the past, many of our neighbors could understand traditional Christian preaching even when they responded with disagreement or indifference. During the last 15 years, however, our message is increasingly met with dumbfounded incomprehension or outrage. Until a generation ago in the United States, most adults had similar moral intuitions whether they were born-again believers, churchgoers, nominal Christians, or nonbelievers. That has changed.

Many have characterized the change over the last generation as “the postmodern turn.” The “modern” era, we are often told, was characterized by confidence in rationality and science and the pursuit of a grand social order that would be mediated by institutions such as the academy and the nation-state. The postmodern era is marked by pluralism, a loss of confidence in the rational, a desire for experience, and so on.

Recently, however, I’ve been reading thinkers who believe that this way of describing things obscures much of what is happening. They say that the term “postmodern” overemphasizes the discontinuities with the recent past and fails to see the strong continuities. They propose that what we have today is not so much a departure from modern patterns of thought and life, but rather an intensification of these patterns as they have now penetrated further into our institutions. These thinkers prefer to talk of “late” modernity or even “liquid” modernity…..”

Read the full article here.