tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329600504016968888.post4690358857420976544..comments2024-03-27T15:47:46.091-05:00Comments on Pastoral Meanderings: Victims of our own success. . . Pastor Petershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10653554256101480140noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329600504016968888.post-51150822317856714462020-03-16T11:01:46.540-05:002020-03-16T11:01:46.540-05:00I read Barzun back in the 1990s, when Foucault and...I read Barzun back in the 1990s, when Foucault and Derrida were the fashionable academic alternatives. Barzun’s gloomy conservatism traces a simplistic, triumphalist rise in Western culture from Greece and Rome to its denouement in Picasso and Stravinsky. Order and tradition are absolutes. Barzun’s taste in art motivates him to state such absurdities as “the forms of art are exhausted.” The only art that is exhausted is the art that Barzun likes. Western society has since moved on to pluralism, the postmodern reaction against modernist egoism that Barzun laments the loss of.<br /><br />As for iPhones, are our grandparents happier communicating via text, Facebook, and reading news on phones versus “the good old days” of silence and isolation?<br /><br />How many more people read the Bible (and even the Book of Concord) now that it is on our phones! Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com