Crowley's Dichotomy

Thanks for such great thoughts on Crowley and what she's trying to do, everyone. Reading your posts helps me to understand her more, and Kevin's helped me to think more about her split between fundamentalist rhetoric and liberal rhetoric. This is one of the book's most fascinating explorations, and the merging of the two seems like the civil discourse she's trying to map a path to. The book itself is not primarily a scholarly mapping of the two, but an embedding of that exploration into what seems like a justification and guide for persuading fundamentalists to abandon their positions. Maybe the pages devoted to showing how awful the far right commentators can be is meant to stir us to action, but I come to it expecting something a little more distanced and nuanced, where I don't have to read Dobson's tirade against Stephanopolous to find out how to reconcile disparate rhetorics. Crowley's book ends up being a test-piloting of this passionate liberal rhetoric she's arguing for, so I, as a reader, end up being a barometer of its effectiveness.

One of the many interesting thoughts inspired by this book is the one that maybe the binary opposition of fundamentalist and liberal can be collapsed. Crowley's depiction of their differences is really interesting, and I found myself nodding in sudden enlightenment, then thinking "huh." Because no fundamentalist would say, "while you liberals believe in a scientifically verifiable reality, I believe in one dictated by God, who is in my heart." The idea that faith can be differentiated from reason is one that Lyotard and his cronies helped to dismantle for us in their exploration of metanarratives. Are the basic differences that she establishes between fundamentalist and liberal culture really as she draws them, or does each group simply draw on different myths?