Thanks for weighing in! I truly appreciate your (name removed by moderator)ut, especially as it comes from a first person perspective! Many blessings to you on your journey and I, for one, will be most happy to welcome you into the Catholic Church!
Thanks! It seems like I keep getting closer and closer. Kind of scary, pretty exciting.
I don’t know much about Webber, but I will certainly do some research per your recommendation.
The book I mentioned is more on the scholarly side of things. It is full of statistics on how differently many people are thinking compared to earlier generations. But it does seem to be a pretty accurate portrayal of many things I thought/felt and the same for many friends.
I wonder, particularly, what is was about the Postmodern thought which led you to consider Catholicism? You mentioned liturgical worship. . .is that the crux?
Ya, liturgical worship was the biggest thing that got me thinking about the Catholic church. I’ve never really been anti-Catholic, I had Catholic friends in college who I knew were deeply committed to Christ and I didn’t have a problem with that. I figured Catholics were Christians at about the same rate as any other denomination, for some it was cultural, but for many it was a true faith. But I hadn’t really thought much about the Catholic faith beyond that.
When I feel in love with the liturgical worship, I began to think about which churches had that style of worship. The Episcopal Church was too liberal and having too many problems. The next most obvious choice was the Catholic Church. So I began reading lots of history and began thinking and praying a lot! And so here I am, headed towards the Catholic Church.
I do think beyond that there are other things that somewhat prepared me for this. I think postmoderns are much more ok with questions that don’t have any exact answers or have the both/and answers someone else mentioned. The lady in charge of Adult Faith Formation at my parish pretty much told me the same thing about the Catholic Church. I also think postmoderns have a bigger focus on hearing and telling stories. That seems to be a lot what the Liturgy of the Word is, hearing the stories of our faith. And while there is some preaching in the homily, there is also time to just allow God to speak to us individually through those stories. Also many, though by no means all, postmoderns have a similar mix of “conservative” and “liberal” values. I tended to be much more conservative on moral issues, but more liberal on things like helping the poor and immigration and the death penalty which seems to be similar to the positions the Catholic Church holds.
I have read that some “postmodernists” have sought to incorporate liturgies and contemplative prayer as a way of returning to orthodoxy. Did you find that to be true?
Another thought I had was regarding an account of a postmodern pastor bringing his youth group to a Catholic monastery for retreats and introducing the Stations of the Cross as part of a Lenten observance. And while I fully recognize that many non-postmodern Evangelicals also dabble in these sorts of Catholic practices, is it fair to say that this is more par for the course in the case of Postmoderns?
I do think postmoderns are using a lot of Catholic things. I ran into this a lot at college. It wasn’t exactly a defined postmodern community, but being that it was pretty much all of us who grew up in the same generation (I’m 25), looking back a lot of it was very postmodern. There were things like the Stations of the Cross, Lecto Divino, and labyrinths, that at the time I didn’t really associate with the Catholic Church, but have since discovered that is where they started. I think postmoderns are open to a variety of ways to experience God and are much more willing to try things that are “new” or different and not necessarily from their own tradition. In many ways this can be good, being more open to experiencing God in a variety of ways, but like all good things, it can be taken too far.
I do think that as more and more people grow up in a postmodern world, it will become more and more “normal” for people to think like this. I don’t think postmodernism is the best thing ever, like all generations there are plenty of good things in it and plenty of bad.
) of what I see as a tendency in postmodernism to sacrifice truth for emotion. At their best Catholicism and “Reformism” both share an insistence on some things are absolutely true, are worth fighting for, are worth dying for. I am suspicious that nothing keeps postmodernism from dissolving into mush. An open mind without borders lets anything in, and then there is no mind. But both Catholic and Reformed thought have been infected with mush. And there are both Catholic and Reformed theologians who, when not fighting each other, are fighting the mush.
