Kieran Beville

  UNDERSTANDING POSTMODERNISM   Ideas of Truth and Revelation -- A Preliminary Discussion of Issues Pertaining to the Feasibility of the Homiletic Task in the Contemporary Epistemological [1] Context This paper constitutes a lecture I gave in 2008, as a Fellow and Scholar of the Society of Oxford Scholars, to the American Society for the Study of Religion, at Oxford University. It was subsequently published as a chapter in my book, Preaching Christ in a Postmodern Culture  (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010).   Much has been written in recent decades describing the phenomenon of postmodernism. What is postmodernism? What are its essential features? For example, Walter Truett Anderson in his book, Reality Isn’t What it Used to Be , says that the world has been radically altered, ‘In recent decades we have passed, like Alice slipping through the looking glass, into a New World .’ [2] He suggests that this altered state of consciousness is the New World ...