That’s not why I made the comment. It was more of an invitation to being self-aware of how and if the text should be objectively understood.
Sorry I jumped the gun there … and thanks for calling my attention to the bolded words! Being someone who favors the hermeneutic that attends to authorial intent, I’m glad we have the author present here to clarify and correct my misunderstanding!
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This author is experienced with and open to peer-editing, understanding my fallibility in expressing my intent. As I said, if the intro to the discussion is unclear, I welcome suggestions for improvement.
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Tsk-tsk Mervin, don’t you know that this is oh so modern 
Butler’s Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction:
“Attention to an author would privilege quite the wrong thing, for seeing him or her as an origin, or a delimiting authority, for the meaning of the text was an obvious example of the (logocentric) privileging of a particular set of meanings.”
“The text, as really constructed by the reader, was thereby liberated and democratized for the free play of the imagination.”
“The pursuit of verbal certainties in interpretation was thought to be as reactionary in its implications as was the manufactured consensus of the established political order.”
I won’t ignore those possibilities either! 
Far be it from me to presume that, say, the U.S. Constitution must be interpreted only within the scope of what its 18th century authors could imagine. How much less would I want to impose such limitations on sacred writ! One can transcend author-centered focus without dismissing such original intent as unimportant or irrelevant as a way of understandig how the Spirit has moved.
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Has anyone looked at Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age? I started listening to it. Wow! There’s a reason that Penner and Smith think so highly of him. The little I’ve heard is like a running commentary of the discussions I’ve seen here about doubt and knowing.
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sounds like a good one. Please let us know more about it, if you don’t mind. I have not read it.
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I am a frequent advocate of the position that morality has all of these aspect to it, both absolute and relative, and both objective and subjective. Some aspects of morality are a matter of arbitrary convention (i.e. relative) because it is often more important to have a rule rather than what rule actually is. But other times there are good reasons why one way of doing things is better than others and only those reasons can introduce anything absolute into morality. Some things in morality can be backed up with objective evidence and other things cannot. This is why we must make a distinction between secular moral demands upon all people and personal moral commitments.
Difficult circumstance and moral conflicts to not invalidate the basic premise of morality that does not see harm done to others as moral. Yes sometimes we have to choose harm between different groups of people and these conflicts can be exceedingly difficult. Other times the conflict is easily resolved by a consideration of the degree of harm and scale. For example, harm to a person’s convenience and freedom to poison themselves does not equal the harm done to the health of other people including children, by smoking in public places.
Agreed. My response, that did not win my teachers approval, was that if the person (or persons) making the decision is willing to lay down their own life but asked God for wisdom then there might be a better solution.
Monday July 18, discussion is open for the Introduction of The End of Apologetics.
Since this is an experimental book group, I’m trying things out here. Together we can learn what kinds of discussion strategies work and don’t work. So, please bear with my experiments.
In case folks who want to participate in this discussion are having a hard time deciding how to start, here are some OPTIONAL questions/prompts you might (or might not) find useful. If you have thoughts or suggestions about including questions in the discussion, feel free to PM me. If there’s interest in the future in doing similar book discussions, we can start establishing a culture for them.
- What can End mean in the book title?
- What point does Penner make, using MacIntyre’s fable?
- What does Penner claim is the problem with Modern (not “contemporary”) apologetics? Why does he claim this?
- What connection does Penner make between postmodernism and Christian apologetics?
- Based on Penner’s description of the rest of the chapters of the book, what are you most looking forward to reading about?
- What questions do you hope the book will address and/or answer?
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Kendel, what an interesting topic!
Just finished reading Penner book via pdf.
Merv’s link to Penner’s interview /podcast was very helpful
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Ov made a start…
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Ov=‘ave?
You’ll be done with the book before lunch I expect. I’m still reworking chapter 3, although there has been little time this week and will be much less this coming week.
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Aye, ‘I have’. And me too! 1/3rd of the way thru’ the intro! Do a bit eclectically if not dilettantishly at a time.
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Blimey. I must be learning proper English. I read that ov correctly the first time.
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I hope you found Penner’s book of value. Get ready to begin discussing the intro Monday, @Paul_Allen1! But as you see there has been plenty pre-discussion discussion already.
What a great question!! Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man came immediately to mind. And I began to suspect I misread the meaning in the title.
What if Penner means the end of apologetics as in what is the chief end of apologetics?
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I’m only starting chapter 2 and very much engrossed. I’m using the link you supplied, Kendel, to read it online - cheapskate that I am. But I would very much like to see what he wrote on pages 51-52. Page 50 ends with such promising thoughts - only to teleport the reader over to p. 53! Anybody have pages 51-52 available somewhere online?
I’ll put a link to my photos from my book in Slide 9 with the other resources. Sorry I have pencil mauled my book so much. You get art-work and commentary as well as text.
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That’s like the presumable play on words in Tim Keller’s title The Reason for God. A reader will be disappointed if they think it means the reason for God’s existence.