[lbo-talk] Signs of the times

[Dennis Claxton]

At 09:13 PM 9/17/2009, Left-Wing Wacko wrote:


>I think it a little unfair to pick on Mormonism as any more nutty
>than Catholicism. Simply because of age?

Wasn't the original Mormon idea to go back to the 
way the church was in the first century?  It is 
the Church of Jesus Christ etc...

A pox on all their houses anyway.  When I think 
of Dante I don't think Catholic.  I think poet.

But then there is that radical kernel mentioned here before:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=9914

Slavoj Zizek has been called [yada yada]..... In 
The Puppet and the Dwarf he offers a close 
reading of today's religious constellation from 
the viewpoint of Lacanian psychoanalysis. He 
critically confronts both predominant versions of 
today's spirituality­New Age gnosticism and 
deconstructionist-Levinasian Judaism­and then 
tries to redeem the "materialist" kernel of 
Christianity. His reading of Christianity is 
explicitly political, discerning in the Pauline 
community of believers the first version of a 
revolutionary collective. Since today even 
advocates of Enlightenment like Jurgen Habermas 
acknowledge that a religious vision is needed to 
ground our ethical and political stance in a 
"postsecular" age, this book­with a stance that 
is clearly materialist and at the same time 
indebted to the core of the Christian legacy­is certain to stir controversy.