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Showing posts with the label deconstructionism

Atheistic malliteracy

Dinesh D'Souza, fellow at the Hoover Institute and frequent columnist on conservative and religious topics, posts a recent article on Townhall.com in which he praises Stanley Fish, the widely cited literary critic, for taking atheists to task via deconstructionism. Fish tells the story of a man who seemingly abandons all (family, friends, who are beckoning him to return to more reasonable/knowable pursuits) to pursue a light which claims to be able to grant him eternal bliss. The deconstructive argument then shows how the atheist position is part of that narrative and depends on it, rather than standing outside it as it claims to be. I will give you one comment from an atheist and my reply: Atheist Comment: Dinesh writes "Fish comments, 'What this shows is that the objections Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens make to religious thinking are themselves part of religious thinking.'" Same old same old, Christians framing atheism in theistic terms that assumes the very con...

Beyond the term “identity”

I didn't want to become one of those grad students who takes forever to find out what he wants to study, so I entered the Masters program at PITT with an idea what I wanted to do as a dissertation: national identity in the Ivory Coast. It sounds like a straightforward enough concept, but I encountered an article while I was taking a history course which looked at several case studies of the construction of racial, ethnic, and gender identities over a variety of geographical locations and historical periods that made me radically re-think the entire concept of identity . It's a concept that makes intuitive sense to most people, I would imagine. It means who you are, right? The layperson could also probably understand quite readily that there seem to be many different levels at which our "identity" can be determined or constrained. A black person may feel more of a racial component to identity than a white person, for example. My religious identity takes primacy over my...