One of my favorite books as a college religion major was Mark C. Taylor's Erring: A Postmodern A/theology. I was a total sucker for deconstructionist punctuation, long before Justin Timberlake started doing it. After Nietzsche, Buber and maybe Heidegger, Taylor did as much as anyone to transform my understanding of the human condition.
Picking up his book 15 years later, of course, I can barely decipher it. Here's a random passage I underlined, meaning that at one point it was not only intelligable to me, but also important.
The purpose of the book is to render present the discourse of the world by bringing about the absolute proximity of perfect transparency of object to subject. Though not always obvious, this aim implies a self-negation of the book. In the course of approximating its goal, the book inscribes a paradoxical "progression" toward its own effacement. Perfect mimesis is no longer mimesis. If imitation were to realize itself completely, it would negate itself by actually becoming the thing imitated.
In 1999, I went back to Taylor for the first time when he created a computer game that I hoped would blow my mind, without requiring much actual reading. But by that time I was apparently post-postmodern again, and the game was just boring.
The good news is that the guy can put away the jargon when he wants to and turn out trenchant commentaries like his Op-Ed in today's Times about the important and underappreciated topic of religious correctness.
It seems the more religious students become, the less willing they are to engage in critical reflection about faith. The chilling effect of these attitudes was brought home to me two years ago when an administrator at a university where I was then teaching called me into his office. A student had claimed that I had attacked his faith because I had urged him to consider whether Nietzsche�s analysis of religion undermines belief in absolutes. The administrator insisted that I apologize to the student. (I refused.)....
For years, I have begun my classes by telling students that if they are not more confused and uncertain at the end of the course than they were at the beginning, I will have failed. A growing number of religiously correct students consider this challenge a direct assault on their faith. Yet the task of thinking and teaching, especially in an age of emergent fundamentalisms, is to cultivate a faith in doubt that calls into question every certainty.
Any responsible curriculum for the study of religion in the 21st century must be guided by two basic principles: first, a clear distinction between the study and the practice of religion, and second, an expansive understanding of what religion is and of the manifold roles it plays in life. The aim of critical analysis is not to pass judgment on religious beliefs and practices � though some secular dogmatists wrongly cross that line � but to examine the conditions necessary for their formation and to consider the many functions they serve.
