Pentecostal and Postmodern: J. Aaron Simmons

The word "postmodernism" has had an interesting history over the past fifty years. Originally, the term described a style of architecture. The word postmodern has since spread to all aspects of culture. Moreover, it has become a key term in the culture wars, especially with regard to certain strands of religious faith.

Postmodernism in these contexts is viewed as the enemy of rationality, revealed religion, and even truth itself. But not all persons of faith agree with this assessment of postmodernism. Our guest, Aaron Simmons, sees postmodernism as one way for religions to recapture a lost humility in the public sphere. For Simmons, postmodernity has less to do with denying truth than it does with saying that truth has certain characteristics that make objectivity and absolute certainty difficult.

Aaron Simmons is assistant professor of philosophy at Furman University in South Carolina. He is the author of God and the Other: Ethics and Politics after the Theological Turn, and he is the editor of several other books dealing with philosophy and religion.

Also on the Show

Our senior producer, Katy Scrogin, reviews the film A Late Quartet, directed by Yaron Zilberman and starring Christopher Walken and Phillip Seymour Hoffman.