Who's Afraid of Relativism?: Community, Contingency, and Creaturehood by James K.A. Smith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Smith offers a fresh analysis of relativism and pragmatism. He argues convincingly that the Christian attacks on “relativism,” while coming from a place of serious and praiseworthy concern, are actually a caricature of what philosophical relativists actually believe. Nobody really believes, deep down, that “anything goes.” Relativism isn’t trying to make that claim. Instead, it is trying to say that what we know to be true is determined in a sense by our community of practice. Therefore, we know the Christian faith to be true in part because we inhabit the community of faith embodied in our local church contexts (read: local embodied communities). This is the fundamental claim of relativism: that truth is known relative to the place in which we find ourselves. That doesn’t mean that all of reality is totally “subjective.” It means instead that we understand and inhabit the world through our local embodied communities. Smith’s analysis is a thoughtful critique of common worldview and apologetics language that comes out of mainstream Christian publications. While he rejects parts of relativism (he uses Augustine’s “plundering the Egyptians” analogy), he affirms that its basic affirmation is actually the only proper Christian epistemology. Smith tends to go a bit easy on people like Richard Rorty and tends to be more critical of his fellow Christians than he ought. With that said, this book offers a redemptive reading of relativists that Christians need to take seriously. View all my reviews
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