Degenerate Moderns

So, I didn't think I could be alone in this endeavor. I've found some other people who are doing the same thing that I am--or, similar, at least.

Some time ago, I read a book called Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior by a scholar named E. Michael Jones, a former professor at Saint Mary's College in Indiana and currently the editor of Culture Wars magazine. He is clearly Catholic (the book was put out by Ignatius Press) and his ideas are obviously--and this is KEY, that the fact IS so obvious--informed by his Catholicism.

Of course, he was also a tenured professor at the time of his publication.

I never looked into anything else he published, and at the time I read the book, I read it simply as an interesting perspective on Modernism, not as anything I would use in, say, a dissertation, since, when I read, I was attempting to integrate myself into the academic world (a choice I increasingly question), and so thought that the ideas expressed therein were only interesting to me as a Christian, not as a potential scholar.

Now, however. . .now that I am approaching my dissertation, as, perhaps, all PhDs do, with some trepidation, with a sense of uncertainty about my ideas; now that I am in a place where I am questioning the futility of what I have decided will be my life's work; now that I am beginning to see, in profound ways, the emptiness of academic life; now my religion, which I have, up until this time, separated from my academics by a high wall, I am beginning to recognize, is the missing something in everything that I have been doing.

And so I began this blog.

And then I remembered Dr. Jones and his "Degenerate Moderns."

Now, my own perspective will not be a "Catholic" one. Indeed, the whole purpose of this is to try and transcend the sectarianism of contemporary Christianity and develop a theoretical lens that is useful across Christian demoninations.

That being said, Dr. Jones's work seems like a good place to start.