Pete Blum

Hillsdale College, Philosophy and Religion, Faculty Member

Hillsdale College, Sociology & Social Thought, Director

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I inhabit boundary regions between sociology, philosophy, theology, religious studies, and poetry. I also write about music.
Supervisors: Stephen H. Watson, Fabio B. Dasilva, and Kevin J. Christiano

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Books by Pete Blum

For a Church to Come: Experiments in Postmodern Theory and Anabaptist Thought

Published by Herald Press (currently out of print)., 2013

"Taking a cue from one of the most (in)famous postmodern thinkers, Friedrich Nietzsche, the essay... more "Taking a cue from one of the most (in)famous postmodern thinkers, Friedrich Nietzsche, the essays in this book put forth “experiments” in thought rather than arguments for fixed conclusions. Blum brings John Howard Yoder to the same table with Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, and provides a provocative glimpse of what the resulting conversation might look like.

As Anne Lamott and others have recently insisted, faith is not the opposite of doubt, but of certainty. Blum’s essays explore some of our commonly held ways of talking about knowledge, meaning, commitment, and action. He suggests that some postmodern theoretical work, often dismissed or assumed to be anti-Christian, is well worth bringing into contemporary Anabaptist-Mennonite conversations about discipleship and corporate life."

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Papers by Pete Blum

Totality, Alterity, and Hospitality: On the Openness of Anabaptist Community

Brethren Life and Thought, 2003

An essay on community and openness to the Other, drawing especially from Derrida, with Durkheim a... more An essay on community and openness to the Other, drawing especially from Derrida, with Durkheim as a sociological reference point. A revised version is in my book, For a Church to Come.
On page 161, at the beginning of the last paragraph in section I, "The experiment will consist of the paradox that I have..." should be "The experiment will consist of problematizing what I have...."

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Typification, Transcendence, and Critique: On the Social Construction of New Age Music

All Music: Essays in the Hermeneutics of Music, ed. Fabio B. Dasilva and David L. Brunsma (Avebury Press), 1996

Adorno's essay. The technological advances have, in his estimation, gone so far as to make even a... more Adorno's essay. The technological advances have, in his estimation, gone so far as to make even a live performance seem less than "natural:" The plucked, bowed, or blown note, unfortified by a battery of microphones, filters, and equalizers, sounds alien next to the shimmering airlessness of the compact disc. This situation clearly puts a music of expression at a disadvantage (Barbiero 1989: 147) But the more interesting half of Barbiero's claim, in the present context, is that regarding listener attention. It is to this half in particular that I wish to give my attention. 3 The old new music, if you will, demands of the listener a temporal rupture that is not easily tolerated by the contemporary ear. "...[O]ur lives come to a standstill as we stop to listen to it; it has nothing to do with or say to our activities".(Barbiero 1989: 145). Barbiero explains that this demand has become so problematic because music has, by and large, become an accompaniment to daily life rather than a suspension of it: The professional with his Walkman, reading the Wall Street Journal or Foreign Affairs on the morning bus, can just as easily be listening to a Schoenberg quartet as he can the latest Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young release. Music has become a background texture for daily life, and we tend to hear it as we hear a film soundtrack: as a supplement to the action within the frame (Barbiero 1989: 147). Successful innovative music, then, will not bemoan these developments, but will consciously tailor itself to work in, with, and under them. Barbiero offers the so-called Ambient music of Brian Eno as an explicit example, though he claims that such music is "not to be confused with Muzak or New Age Music".(Barbiero 1989: 148). Why he is interested in pressing the distinction between Ambient and New Age is not clear, for as Hullot-Kentor (1989: 154) rightly points out, in addition to being a profound influence on many explicitly New Age musicians, Eno has also contributed to the discussion of his music in highly visible contexts defined as New Age (cf. Birosik 1989: xvi). Eno's central aesthetic intentions, regardless of the label that he attaches to them himself, cannot be set apart with any degree of clarity, I would contend, from those of many other musicians whose classification as New Age is much less controversial.

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