McCarraher on Radical Orthodoxy.

Eugene McCarraher has given a three part interview to the Other Journal. McCarraher’s a Christian socialist who is one of the most visible and ferocious critics of the First Things crowd. I find him to be consistently interesting, even if I have trouble understanding his confidence. Here's what he had to say about the Radical Orthodoxy (RO) movement in the third part of the interview:

“Before I go on further about McCabe, let me offer a critique of RO, because if RO led me to McCabe, McCabe led me away from RO. Like a lot of Christian intellectuals over the last two decades, I quaffed a bit of the Kool-Aid served up by those in the RO constellation. Well, if I can extend the Kool-Aid metaphor a bit, drinking from the cistern of RO was refreshing and stimulating, particularly the idea that theology can be a distinct and compelling form of social and cultural criticism—of all the literature on that score, I think Graham Ward’s Cities of God is a real milestone. But as I’ve watched how some of this has played out or not played out over the last decade, I’ve concluded that the theological renaissance these figures embodied not only has waned, but also has encouraged some very bad mental and political habits. For one thing, I’m tired of hearing ‘modernity’ and ‘liberalism’ treated as though they were the spawn of Satan. Along with the other usual suspects—instrumental reason, science, universal rights, cosmopolitanism, ‘the Enlightenment project’—modernity and liberalism get hauled into the docket and found guilty, usually after a perfunctory trial, of the Judeocide, ecological catastrophe, capitalism, nuclear war, abortion, et cetera, ad nauseam. Give me a frigging break. When modernity and liberalism are this all-encompassing, they’ve become nothing more than verbal ciphers, containers for everything the writer doesn’t like, bestowing license to utter all manner of grandiose and stupid pontifications. With a lot of these people, liberalism equals nihilism, which equals the lowest circle of the inferno. The theological problem with this view is that it tends to completely strip the created world of its goodness. Can’t liberal modernity mediate grace or partake of beatitude in some fashion? Since when did Gothic architecture and the like become the only sanctioned media of Trinitarian love? Since when did Brave New World become the final word on modernity? So if you want to deride instrumental reason and technology, fine, but just remember all that when you have a toothache, or if the specialist discovers a tumor in time, or if your wife needs emergency assistance during childbirth. If you want to curse cosmopolitanism, fine, but just stop jetting across the oceans and using the Internet to do it, all the while lecturing the rest of us about nestling in the homespun joys of localism.”

I am a little curious as to how McCarraher would relate this to MacIntyre, for whom he has kind words in another section of the interview. But more generally, I think this paragraph describes pretty well an excess to which I was especially prone for several years. I don’t think I’ve adopted another point of view on the matter; I’ve just gotten much less confident in my ability to know what the boundaries of “modernity” and “liberalism” really are.