Catholic or Post-Modernist

An interesting checklist, though I'm not sure their last point really gets at the heart of that issue:

I want to...submit that there are a number of persistent habits of postmodern discourse that pretty much all of us have been habituated to in our sojourn in this post-modern city, and that we ought to purge from ourselves. There is a good chance that we might be confusing ourselves and others if we are doing any of the following, and I would submit that it would be a good thing to ask regularly for the aid of the Saints to keep ourselves from…

1. Thinking that values are something that we choose depending upon what we find works for us. According to this popular way of thinking, a woman suffering from the anguish of infertility will invariably choose a value system that helps her to conceive a baby by any means necessary, and a woman who has decided not to pursue a career and who seems to conceive more often than some people sneeze will find that the values of NFP make her feel fulfilled. In either case, the absolute and sovereign right of the individual to choose her own values and to be free of having to defend or explain them is fanatically asserted; in either case, the assumption is that “values” are not really our highest rational commitments—they are nothing other than a means individuals choose to gratify their non-rational drives for things like personal fulfillment, “authenticity”, the will-to-power, the ultimate orgasm, etc. If you find yourself saying that values are just something relative and subjective, and that every individual’s choice of them is inviolate, then you might be talking like a postmodernist, and not like a Catholic Christian.
2. Thinking that everything is “personal”—that a discussion about whether or not it is appropriate to wear shorts and flip-flops to mass is ipso facto a personal insult to everyone who has ever gone BBQ-casual to the Lamb’s High Feast; that suggesting tattoos are more pagan than Christian is offensive to all the good Catholics and Christians who have tattoos; that someone’s idea that a good Catholic homily should cite books more than sports is nothing more than an expression of that person’s personal preference for books over sports. If you find yourself thinking “this impersonal and objective argument is offensive to me because it suggests that I might be wrong about something,” or “this impersonal- and objective-sounding argument is nothing more than this person’s preferences, likes, dislikes, or loyalties, so I don’t have to take it seriously,” then you might be thinking like a postmodernist, and not like a Catholic Christian.
3. Really, really loving pop culture—music, movies, news media, talk radio, television shows (even really smart ones)—or just finding yourself always thinking in its images, its tones and rhythms, its personalities, or arguing that there is no distinction in value between the work of, say, Caravaggio andAvatar. If you find yourself talking about Dennis Prager or Hugh Hewitt more often than you do about the Pope’s weekly Angelusaddress, or arguing that “Lost” is a real work of genius, right up there with The Divine Comedy, then you might be talking like a postmodernist, and not like a Catholic Christian.