FF: In this liturgical analysis of culture, what are some the central practices you see out there forming us as late moderns?

JS: Such analysis is always very contextual. It really depends on where you are both regionally and in terms of class. So, for example, the secular liturgies of Canada are going to be different than the secular liturgies that should concern us in the United States. Similarly, the secular liturgies that affect professionals are going to be different, in some ways, than those that might captivate the working class.

That said, I do think the rituals of consumerism work on all of us in ways we don’t realize. We are immersed in a culture where marketing is ubiquitous, and the way marketing works is to appeal affectively and narratively to our unconscious, recruiting our imaginations such that we long for a vision of the “good life” that has seeped into us without realizing it—a vision of the good life that is bent on acquisition, competition, and disposal.

We might also be able to do a “liturgical analysis” of how we interact with these little machines in our hands, smart phones. There are micro-rituals associated with smart phones that, over time, implicitly train us to expect that world to be available to us on our terms: what we want when we want it. The human-machine interface leads us to relate to the world as constantly available, and available to us and for us. And that micro-ritual starts to spill over into our macro-lives so that, before you know it, you unconsciously learn to relate to the world and your neighbors in this way.

But each community needs to undertake its own liturgical analysis of cultural contexts. For example, I think graduate school is its own kind of “novitiate,” inculcating a vision of life well beyond the expertise of any particular discipline. (Actually, I think Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions appreciated this a long time ago.) What are the unique rituals that shape the experience of law school, for example? Or what are the secular liturgies that characterize the world of finance? What story is implicitly carried in the practices of this cultural institution? That’s the question we need to be asking.

FF: One of the fields of philosophy you’ve drawn on repeatedly in your career is postmodern, Continental philosophy of the kind that many Christians tend to be wary of. What does your experience engaging postmodern French philosophy say about the larger Christian engagement with the world or with groups we tend to see as adversaries?

JS: My approach is just like that of Augustine and Calvin. I understand that all truth is God’s truth. So I don’t think God necessarily favors analytic philosophy vs. continental voices when it comes to helping us understand, say, the nature of language. So just as Augustine and Calvin were willing to learn from pagan philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, so I’ve tried to be a discerning reader of figures like Derrida and Foucault. That doesn’t mean simply baptizing their thought, but it does mean coming to it with a stance of charity that looks for the places where I can learn.

I suppose I was drawn to “postmodern” thought precisely because it offered a critique of modernity. And I think evangelicalism’s easy wedding with modernity has been a source of many of our problems. So in a way, by listening to Derrida’s and Foucault’s and Rorty’s critiques of modernity, I was also opened to hear anew the sources of premodern wisdom in the tradition. It’s why I sometimes say that it was Derrida who led me to be catholic.

FF: Speaking of Continental thought, you’ve also done a lot of work on the “Radical Orthodoxy” movement. What is Radical Orthodoxy and what’s its relevance for non-academics?

JS: Radical Orthodoxy represents a contemporary Christian intellectual “sensibility” that exhibits two important features: it affirms that the Christian faith is relevant to every sphere of culture while at the same time looking to pre-modern sources (Augustine, Aquinas, and others) for contemporary wisdom. This resonates a lot with my own Kuyperian tradition, which is probably why Radical Orthodox caught my attention early on.

When I published Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, way back in 2005, the work of John Milbank and Graham Ward and Catherine Pickstock and others was getting a lot of attention. Their writing is notoriously dense and opaque, and yet I think there are some real gems of insight in what they’re saying, so IRO was kind of a “translation” project.