NT Wright is right

I enjoy the lectures of scholar and theologian NT Wright, including this lecture of his which included the following, a telling synopsis of postmodernism:

“…who doesn’t know what a traumatic time the twentieth century has been[?] Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx were quite right. We had a war to end wars, and we’ve had nothing but wars since. We had a sexual revolution, and now we have AIDS and more family-less people than ever before. We pursued wealth, but we had inexplicable recessions and ended up with half the world in crippling debt. We can do what we like, but we’ve all forgotten why we liked it. Our dreams have gone sour, and we don’t even know who ‘we’ are any more. And now even the church has let us down, corrupting its spiritual message with talk of cosmic and political liberation.”

Wright would most assuredly object at my inclusion of this paragraph, as it is outside of its context, but I found this encapsulated the struggle of postmodernism in its continued response to modernism. This is a reaction to Matthew Arnold’s famous poem, “Dover Beach,” which you would find more adroitly articulated if you visit the link.