Definitions

Ok, McLaren uses 2 terms thoughout the book that need clarification so we can all be on the same page as we begin this discourse.

Modern(ity) - used to identify the world in which we have lived in over the past 500 years. McLaren gives 10 phrases to help clarify what modernity was/is all about.

1. an era of conquest and control ("modern people have dedicated themselves to controlling people, results, risks, economies, experiments, profit margins, variables, nature, even weather.")
2. age of the machine ("the universe itself came to be seen as a vast machine, controlled by an engineer-God, and ultimately, modern folk themselves became small cogs in the machine, machines themselves."
3. age of analysis ("by taking wholes or effects apart into smaller and smaller parts or causes, each of which become understandable, analysis renders the universe both knowable and controllable")
4. age of secular science (basically everything can be explained through science)
5. age aspiring to absolute objectivity ("assumed was the highest faith in human reason to replace all mysteries with comprehension, superstition with fact, ignorance with information, and subjective religious faith with objective truth")
6. critical age ("if you believe that you absolutely, objectively know the absolute, objective truth, and you know this with absolute certainty, then of course you must debunk anyone who sees differently from you.")
7. age of the modern nation-state and organization ("modernity has been the story of organization and reorganization")
8. age of individualism ("the modern era moved inexorably from a focus on 'we' to a focus on 'me'")
9. age of Protestantism and institutional religion ("Where religion most thrived in the modern world, it was in its most institutional forms and its most Protestant forms")
10. age of consumerism ("people often quoted the maxim 'Money can't buy happiness' but seldom acted as if they believed it")

Postmodern(ity) - the age we are moving into. "Post" does not equal "anti." Postmodern is simply growing out of modernity having learned from that era. Kind of like saying you are postpubescent having gone through puberty making you no longer a child, but rather, an adolescent. (we may not really be able to know what the postmodern era looks like because we are just now entering into it. it would all be speculation)