I have started to record some design concerns. For some reason it makes sense to me to do so here.

It makes sense because, though the site is just starting, it is a community.

All part of Web existence.

Not exactly like a lost sheep, but Harold Bloom has strayed at one crucial point.

In his helpful catalog of 100 souls to whom we would do well to listen, Genius, he surmises that the dawning age will be one of theocracies. That is to say, he did surmise shortly after 9/11, when his compendium of 100 worthy minds appeared, that the clash of rival religions would be the benchmark of an age beyond postmodernism — or some similar designation for the age beyond the age he bemoans the loss of — namely the age before Barthes and Foucault and presumably about every other “postmodern” French intellectual.

Well, I merely wish to address his premise, because it is the exact opposite of my own. His premise is apparently that, also, of a late president of Yale.

My guess it is the premise of many. It has the hollow ring of journalistic gravitas Few would agree with me that we are in fact moving inexorably in the direction of secular and even rational bases for building a tolerable accommodation to life on this planet.

I base my assumption on my personal intellectual journey beyond the creedal basis for Christianity. This is an extended argument which can be capsulized as follows: The creedal basis of Christianity is essentially religion and religion is essentially an idolatrous enterprise which supports institutional and priestly arrangements which reduce rather than enhance the prospects for human fulfillment and ethical progress.

What I premise is the emergence of a tolerant understanding — Web-assisted iof you will — that allows for a pluralism of perceptions based on the premise that human beings — even those given divine status — are incapable or creating systems to which all must assent. (Nonidolatry) Even “scientific” premises are by definition not fixed and immutable.

The world, as Bonhoeffer understood, has come of age. Postmodernism is merely a flexing of intellectual muscle in the wake of 19th century perceptions about subjectivity and discourse.

The way ahead is secular but not devoid of spirituality. Harold Bloom is wrong in assuming otherwise. He should be happy that I am right. This is a world in which his hero Emerson has a better chance of surviving than he allows in Genius.

I am deemed an optimist in light of what is happening. The only difference between myself and those who believe that theocracies are ascending is that I see the emergence of such — from the caves of Pakistan to the precincts of the White House — as a cynical death rattle, not as an enduring trend.

Our daily bread is Abba’s daily gift
And we refuse it when we do not share
Hypocrisy pervades the prayer we lift
When we pray us and our but do not care
If babes go hungry under Sudan’s rule
Or flood-starved families are left to die
Who says I pray for me prays as a fool
Who says my daily bread makes life a lie
Aye we have lost the we the our is gone
And love will languish ’til we see the light
And share a way we can agree upon
And only Abba’s way is true and right
So when we come to this familiar phrase
We hear it not until we change our ways

By Stephen C. Rose