Bon Voyage My Loves

Marrying Eralda has been one of the best decisions I've ever made. I say that for many reasons, and one of those reasons is because, as a result, little Jack Tarpley has been brought into the world. I love the fact that Eralda is from Albania, and I adore her family back home. I just wish they didn't live across an ocean, on a distant continent.

Tomorrow, Eralda and Jack will board an airplane and disappear from my everyday life for almost three weeks. The last time this happened, as many of my friends will attest, I went kind of crazy. Not good crazy, either. The kind of crazy that left me prostrate on the carpet letting a dog lick my face.

I'm going to try harder this time to keep busy, to keep myself surrounded with friends and constructive things to do. In anticipation of how much I'm going to miss my son, I took him to SFA's labyrinthine arboretum. I let him ride his bike, and I followed behind him on my 42" longboard (the closest thing to a surfboard you can ride on the asphalt). We rode until we were both sweaty and tired. At one point, as he was pumping his tiny legs on his pedals, Jack looked up at me and said, "Daddy? It's a beautiful day, daddy. It's a beautiful day." I don't know how I stayed on the longboard. I could barely answer him with a steady voice. "Yeah, buddy. It's a beautiful day."

Postmodernism vs. Fundamentalism

I've been silent for awhile. Mostly because I feel like I don't have much new to say. Also because I've been very busy. Friday, however, was my last day on the job at the Columbia Center, and I'll be spending much more of my time teaching at SFASU and doing scholarly things.

I'm around a lot of people who would consider themselves postmodernists. To their credit, only one or two of them have looked at me askance when I mention that I'm a Christian, or that I attend church services at a conservative congregation. They have a right to look at me funny! Especially given that I'm very liberal, and that you could characterize most of my thinking as postmodern. I was reading some more Bhaskar, feeling guilty about not updating this blog recently, when I stumbled upon this from his Reflections on Meta-Reality:

It is interesting here because post-modernism has a sort of twin, a cousin which is fundamentalism... They both accept difference, the essentiality of difference and the non-existence of universality and unity. But the post-modernist says yes, we differ, and there is no right and wrong. The fundamentalist says yes, we differ and I am right. There is a difference in rhetoric but the basic stance is the same.

I'm not a postmodernist because ultimately I believe there's such a thing as independent reality, transcendent meaning, and what amounts to God. I'm not a fundamentalist because I don't believe I have the market cornered when it comes to truth. I will be posting soon specifically about why I go to church...