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Books
Shadow of Spirit
Clive Marsh reviews Shadow of Spirit – Postmodernism and Religion, edited by Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick.
Depending on who you are talking to, postmodernism is a contemporary fad with no real intellectual content to it which is already on the wane, the most exciting cultural shift in a long time, or a confusing collection of disparate ideas – some of them very important – which have been loosely grouped together. I tend towards the third option and believe that my judgment is confirmed by this book. The nineteen essays presented here derive in the main from a 1990 Cambridge conference and are grouped under three main heads; ‘Maps and Positions’, ‘Ethics and Politics’ and ‘Gender and Psyche’. Their common thread, though it really is only a thread, is a concern to identity postmodernism’s impact on appreciation of the sacred (understood in the widest sense possible).
As one would expect from a collection of essays, and the more so from a collection of essays on postmodernism, the range of topics covered and the accessibility of their style and language vary enormously.
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