Note from Rowland (Feb. 25. 2010):

Robert Inchausti, also author of a couple of books about Thomas Merton, also Spitwad Sutras: Classroom Teaching as Sublime Vocation, and The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People… He is professor of English at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.

I only recently discovered this author, and he’s brilliant. I don’t pretend to understand everything he wrote, but his main thesis in Subversive Orthodoxy (3rd printing December 2005) is pretty straight-forward: ‘[These] Christian thinkers [see a list of some of them below] aren’t all that interested in defending their faith… Their thinking is not strictly speaking “apologetics” but something more engaged – an attempt to “say” what the world looks like through eyes transformed by an encounter with the living God… (p. 181)… ‘They desire to live in the truth even more than they desire to be effective in the world… [For them] injustice is not something to be defeated. It must be constantly combated. When it disappears in one place it reappears in another… Evil manifests itself more in an absence of care, in an absence of perception, and in the negation of Being than it does in the presence of stupidity, violence, or even hatred’ (188).

Here’s the sort of sentence you have to study carefully – and then you may not understand it:

‘The experience of a trinitarian model of human communication makes it possible to talk systematically about contingency, angst, and moral confusion without having to explain them away as mere epiphenomena of simpler structures of cause and effect…’ (179).

You get the idea?

Here’s a good teaser from a blog I came across:

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Avant-Garde Orthodox

(“orthodox” in the broadest sense)

Interesting article on what sounds like a good book

It’s not easy to place thinkers as diverse as Walker Percy, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Martin Luther King Jr., G.K. Chesterton, and Northrop Frye into the same category. But Robert Inchausti, English professor at California State Polytechnic, San Luis Obispo, says they were all avant-garde orthodox Christians. No matter their different political, denominational, or literary positions, they all sought to be faithful to Jesus while engaging the world. In Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise, Inchausi discusses Christian thinkers, writers, and activists who challenged secular worldviews on their own turf, yet remained thoroughly Christian.

Who are the avant-garde Orthodox?

These were orthodox Christian thinkers and artists who were not theologians and made important and somewhat revolutionary contributions to various secular disciplines. They’re interesting people because they’re both subversive of the existing modern order, but they are not subversive of the church or subversive of the faith.

They have a unique status as people who model for us how it is possible for believing Christians to enter into dialogue with the secular culture in a way that revolutionizes and transforms the secular culture and doesn’t just protest against it or isolate from it.

If you look at some of the major Christian artists and thinkers and social critics over the last hundred years, you find a variety of political, artistic, and intellectual schools within which they operate. Yet, they still share Christ as their major inspiration. You have somebody like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who from an American political perspective would be very conservative. He single-handedly did away with Marxism as an attractive philosophy for Paris intellectuals. And at the same time you have somebody like Dorothy Day, whose entire witness to the poor in the United States was to defend small families and small farms and collectives and indigenous poor against a social Darwinism that she thought was running away with American culture during the Cold War years.

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Among those subversive orthodox Christians mentioned are

– Walker Percy – Dorothy Day – Jacques Ellul – Søren Kierkegaard – Jack Kerouac – Marshall McLuhan – Ivan Illich – Andy Warhol – Pasternak – Wendell Berry – Thomas Merton – E.F. Schumacher – Dostoyevsky – Chesterton – Martin Luther King, Jr. – Solzhenitsyn – Rene Girard

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And a comment:

These were orthodox Christian thinkers and artists who were not theologians and made important and somewhat revolutionary contributions to various secular disciplines. They’re interesting people because they’re both subversive of the existing modern order, but they are not subversive of the church or subversive of the faith…

More…

http://amywelborn.typepad.com/openbook/2005/07/avantgarde_orth.html

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A mixed review:

Review By Dan Clendenin

Robert Inchausti, Subversive Orthodoxy; Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2005), 219pp.

One of the best things going in Christian publishing today is Brazos Press, an imprint of the otherwise Calvinist and conservative Baker Book House. Under the guidance of editor Rodney Clapp, Brazos is marketing genuinely creative, provocative. and broadly Christian authors who want to think and write with timely relevance at the intersection of contemporary culture and Christian faith. Robert Inchausti, professor of English at California State Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo, for example, explores the cultural critiques of twenty thinkers who, whatever their many diverse differences, all took great exception to the received wisdom of their day. Dorothy Day led the way in social justice, as did Martin Luther King. Jacques Ellul and Ivan Illich offered big-picture critiques. Walker Percy and Boris Pasternak were novelists and, as such, two of our best theologians (none of the twenty figures he explores are theologians in the technical sense). Inchausti organizes these twenty subverters of conventional wisdom under five main chapter headings: the soul under siege, the novel as countermythology, antipolitical politics, macrohistorical criticism, and the role of the Christian mysteries in the life of the modern mind. I found these categories rather broad, and something of an artificial stretch to place radically diverse thinkers under each theme. Further, trying to tackle so many seminal intellectuals means he can devote only five to ten pages to each. The result felt choppy. GK Chesterton and Goethe in four pages each? King and McLuhan get about a dozen pages each, but these were “long” by the book’s standards. In such short chapters I found it difficult to enter into the thought of the many subjects about which I was ignorant. If you do not already know Pasternak, William Blake, or Rene Girard, for example, this book might not be the best introduction to their thought. Still, it is a fine contribution for a Christian intellectual to tackle and honor the contributions of these titans and their efforts to map the journey of Christian faith in the real world.

http://www.journeywithjesus.net/BookNotes/Robert_Inchausti_Subversive_ Orthodoxy.shtml

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And this from the Facebook page:

“In the early 1960s, an interviewer was trying to get Ernest Hemingway to identify the characteristics required for a person to be a “great writer.” As the interviewer offered a list of various possibilities, Hemingway disparaged each in sequence. Finally, frustrated, the interviewer asked, “Isn’t there any one essential ingredient that you can identify?” Hemingway replied, “Yes, there is. In order to be a great writer a person must have a built-in, shockproof crap detector.”

“The incarnation, like the resurrection, and like the very notion of divinity itself, cannot be reduced to a precept, fact, or a theory; nor is it even, strictly speaking, a doctrine. It is, rather, a revelation that must be experienced in order to be understood, a reality wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, miniaturized into a narrative that proves itself apodictically true by the realities it reveals. The false knowledge that blocks our capacity to experience this shift in awareness from the mundane to the sublime changes from epoch to epoch and from place to place..” – Robert Inchausti (Subversive Orthodoxy).

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2340019247