Jim> One of the more interesting portions of the article is
Jim> Wolfe's finding that many evangelical scholars have taken an
Jim> interest in postmodern thought including especially the
Jim> writings of Foucault and Derrida. What these scholars have
Jim> found attractive in postmodernism is its critique of the
Jim> Enlightenment. The only thing surprising about this
Jim> development in my view is that it has apparently took such a
Jim> long time for the evangelicals to discover pomo.
It's not that new. It was happening as early as 1988 around the edges of the evangelicial world (which is, as the article rightly states, quite intellectually timorous).
There has also been an evangelical Catholic (mis)appropriation of pomo, precisely for its critique of the Enlightenment, at least as long.
In my other life, as a person with an overdue dissertation in Religious Studies, I've been listening to evangelicals and moderates at conferences sniff around the edges of the French since at least the late 80s, when I was but a wee undergrad.
There is a strand of American evangelicalism (a strand that has fundamentalist varieties too) that seeks, by various means, to recast or reconstruct the modern world into the world of 1st century Palestine. (Why they want to do this is another story for another day.)
One method is by historical-critical scholarly inquiry (of a sort); the other is by a kind of ecstatic, mystical religious experience. That is, there are both rational and mystical strands of reconstructionist thought in modern evangelical Protestantism in America.
Both strands have shown some interest in pomo for different reasons; the former because they've been trying to get around the damning implications of Englightenment historical-critical inquiry into Christianity for at least 100 years; the latter because they mistake an anti-rationalist (or, perhaps, better: anti-Enlightenment-rationalism) element of pomo (to say nothing of the plain irrational element) as a denunciation of the possibility of rational adjudication in religion altogether, clearing the field for their mysticism.
>From a scholar's perspective, these are interesting, but not terribly
new, developments.
Best, Kendall Clark -- THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS http://monkeyfist.com/