Here’s a CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) podcast on Radical Orthodoxy that includes extended soundbites from John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock. What they say sounds sensible enough to me, although they’re academics so it’s all quite theoretical and respectable-sounding, and Milbank at any rate has an ingrained attachment to socialism.
In a way, their views seem a bit odd, given their positions and the positive coverage from CBC, which includes assurances that it’s all very pomo and not at all reactionary. It seems obvious that the modern approach to life and thought functions as a religion, and is, as they say, totalizing. I don’t think JM and CP would disagree with that. If that’s so, though, then seriously rejecting that approach will make you appear evil and irrational from the standpoint that absolutely dominates public life and thought today. JM says he likes angels, for example. Is he publicly going to come out in favor of demonic possession? How about those embarrassing social issues that the Pope talks about now and then?
To tell the truth, I don’t know what the answers are. I’ve read a couple of things JM has written and heard him speak and even talked to him a couple of times, and it seemed to me he wanted to maintain respectability among the respected, but apart from such impressions I know very little about him.