Here I am

It was amusing reading Pete Wilkinson’s perceptions of other posters here; my autoperception of my perceived image (yay self-referencing!) would be as "the quiet kid in the corner wearing a Brutal Truth shirt," or something to that effect (although I haven’t posted enough for that to show through yet.)

Ordinarily I’d rather let my words speak for me, but since I’m coming from what I’m inclined to think is a rather different perspective here I suppose an introduction is in order for context…

I grew up in a nice liberal-Presbyterian church that never quite recovered from half the congregation moving out of town with Union Carbide. So it goes, I guess. The rest of the family moved on to the local proto-megachurch, which leaves me very cold - partially on theological grounds, but mostly the praxis and the music. (I can’t shake the feeling that there are better ways to use a Les Paul through a Marshall.)

Praxis was a major source of introspection and trouble for me; it still is. Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day (there’s a House of Hospitality maybe twenty minutes from where I live; my old church used to do a lot with them), and Jacques Ellul were moving; they still are.

Somewhen I discovered anarchism and never really looked back. For all its flaws, it has a serious moral discussion and a social vista that American society didn’t and doesn’t have anything to compare with.

I discovered philosophy in 2000 or so; it got me intellectually through a year of grueling and thankless work. In hindsight there are parallels between myself and Alasdair MacIntyre (also an inspiration), although they got derailed after my hospitalization in Miami. (On that, Google for articles around the last week of November 2003, even though everybody gets facts wrong. My explaining it would create the wrong sort of relationship between us, and more bluntly I’m tired of talking about it; I mentioned it here because it had a serious impact on my thinking.)

I discovered this site, "post-evangelicalism," the emerging church movement, and the rest of the complex within a twenty-minute period maybe three weeks ago, and was intoxicated with it. (And excited. To find a group of Christians who’d read more philosophy than I had and weren’t offensive to my axiology was a blessing. Or at least a windfall.)

So here I am: Asperger’s syndrome, misunderstandings, doubts, philosophical problems, obscure discordant soundtrack and all, drawing on a bit of Foucault and a lot of Debord in a milieu that seems more Lyotard-Rorty.

Here goes nothing.