A Brief Book Notice from Books At a Glance
In Post Woke, Neil Shenvi and Pat Sawyer help us understand how ideas drawn from critical theory have shaped current cultural thinking and practice, equipping the reader to address difficult topics with reason, compassion, and conviction.
Table of Contents
1 The Great Awokening
2 How We Got Here
3 Wokeness and Contemporary Critical Theory
4 Thinking Well, Thinking Biblically
5 Challenging Contemporary Critical Theory
6 Race
7 Gender
8 Sexuality
9 Reaching Out
10 What Now?
Selected Quotes
- “The younger generation has been steeped in woke ideology for a decade. Current high school and college students will graduate and will bring their deeply held beliefs with them when they become our nation’s next crop of lawyers, doctors, company executives, judges, educators, politicians, campus ministers, and pastors.” (21)
- “Racial bigotry is a pronounced perversion, a direct and blasphemous assault on the imago Dei.” (34)
- “Critical theorists’ scholarship is, and has always been, directed toward human liberation via deconstruction of the oppressive hegemonic norms under which we all live.” (73)
- “In this chapter we’ll show why an understanding of logic is so important for dealing with contemporary critical theory. As it turns out, activists who are steeped in the idea of contemporary critical theory often rely on poor or muddled thinking in their analyses of social problems.” (84)
- “Christians need to avoid two opposite errors: (1) embracing everything secular scholarship tells us, and (2) rejecting everything secular scholarship tells us.” (100)
- “While we’d readily admit that injustices are committed against individual Black people, the question is whether people of color as a group are oppressed. For instance, do Blacks as a whole experience oppression at the hands of police?” (138)
- “In this section, we want to give you some perspectives and best practice for protecting your kids from falling for the deleterious perspectives and implications of woke ideology. Whether the issue is race, class, sexuality, gender, nationality, etc., following these directives will go a long way in protecting your children from the seduction of woke thinking.” (211)
- “Wokeness is the contemporary cultural expression of critical theory, a set of academic ideas that has come to function as a comprehensive worldview. It offers a vision of social reality, knowledge, identity, morality, and justice.” (233)