Thursday, July 14, 2005
Fear And Loathing In The Legacy Media
Pyromaniac got uncharacteristically political in a post yesterday, and I really liked it, but he also got characteristically down to brass tacks.
But this story absolutely got to me. It's from Tuesday's NYTimes. It's about the (shudder) growing place of evangelicals in the Air Force chaplaincy. This sentence is amazing
There's that tricky dogma again.
Yet the high priests and priestesses of the mainstream media remain blindly committed to their credo: moral neutrality is the one permissible dogma of this postmodern era.Fascinatingly, if that credo truly is dogmatic, doesn't it automatically disqualify itself as "postmodern." Is not the point of postmodernism to avoid dogmatics -- but then postmodernism would just be a house of cards. Wouldn't that disappoint a lot of people.
But this story absolutely got to me. It's from Tuesday's NYTimes. It's about the (shudder) growing place of evangelicals in the Air Force chaplaincy. This sentence is amazing
The chaplains, who pledge when they enter the military to minister to everyone, Methodist, Mormon or Muslim, attended workshops on "The Purpose Driven Life," the best seller by the megachurch pastor Rick Warren, and on how to improve their worship services.The implication is that more traditional chaplains who were "just" Roman Catholic, or Methodist, or Presbyterian or Jewish or...could somehow fulfill that pledge, but evangelicals cannot. No check that, the real point they are trying to make is that military chaplains should not really believe anything, they should just wear labels that sound like they do.
There's that tricky dogma again.
