Word: antimodern
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...Rick Warren are launching publishing empires from the pulpit, and U.S.-style megachurches are sprouting from Seoul to Guatemala City, where one cavernous house of worship boasts a helipad (and an address off "Burger King Drive"). The authors falter by limiting their discussion of non-Christian faiths--including virulently antimodern strains of radical Islam. Readers are left to decide whether this religious revival is something to relish...
...antimodern, or "postmodern," movement of the past decade has shaken this complacency. Postmodernism is just as abstract, arrogant and alienated from popular culture as "less-is-more" modernism ever was. Worse, it has abandoned all the social aspirations of the early modern movement. Yet antimodernism has demonstrated one important lesson: the absurdity of seeking a universal style. Designers talk increasingly about "pluralism," and they even picked up computer-advertising jargon about "user friendliness...
...European Romantics of the early 1800s had loudly proclaimed the primacy of the individual, the glories of revolution and similar disruptive ideas that have carried forward, with a few halts and alterations, from their time to ours. But in the 19th century there were still too many tugs in antimodern directions, too many elements of life either stifling or civilizing, depending on one's viewpoint, to allow mere anarchy. Form and ceremony were not yet dead. War itself seemed to serve as a civilizing institution, the illusion still holding that war was an ennobling experience, that destruction was good...
Medieval playacting? The dedicated "companions" who make up the Laboring Order of the Ark are convinced that their ascetic, antimodern life is the only way that the principles of the Sermon on the Mount can conscientiously be carried out. Oddly enough, the inspiration for this attitude does not come directly from Christ but from the patron saint of modern India, Mohandas Gandhi. "Nowhere have I encountered a political, social, economic and practical doctrine which in my opinion conforms more to Christ's teachings than Gandhi's," says Joseph Lanza del Vasto, 61, the white-bearded, mystical founder...
Vegetables in Pain. Within a decade of his conversion he was back at Oxford (1926) as Roman Catholic chaplain to the undergraduates, dispensing port and bananas along with basic spiritual nourishment. He never proselytized, regarding himself "as the shepherd with the crook, not the fisherman with the hook." Determinedly antimodern (he was 66 years old when he saw his first movie), Knox spoofed the pretensions of science by offering a lecture on the newly audible sounds of "vegetables in pain." He was a classic conservative who spoke of putting up "some kind of barrage against this revolting...