A professor came to our parish to discuss post-modernism in the 21st-century church. It’s hard to get a handle on what we learned, and maybe I’ll collect my thoughts for another post.

As an introduction, our priest ran a couple of clips from the movie (or should I say “film”?) Derrida, a biography of the French deconstructionist philosopher who recently found out whether there’s any reality outside himself. The presentation was happening in our unfinished parish hall, which has abysmal acoustics, and it was played on a 14-inch TV, which used to be OK in our former space, but is too small to be seen at any distance. It was emblematic of post-modernism all by itself: talking heads speaking mostly in French (or English with a thick French accent), inaudible in the echoing chamber, with subtitles so small as to be unreadable.