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I have always known Richard Rorty to be a decent man. I was a graduate student at the University of Virginia when he joined the faculty in 1986 as University Professor of Humanities. He arrived in Charlottesville with a MacArthur Grant in hand but taught three courses his first year anyway. He made himself available to students, accepted most invitations for late night gatherings at Court Square Pub, opened up his farmhouse for social events, and sat on dissertation committees (including some in theology). If you had a question you needed to ask him, you could usually find him in his cinder-block office in Cabell Hall. He'd do his best to oblige. The harsh and sometimes mean-spirited criticisms of Rorty's work that have become de rigueur among Christian and non-Christian intellectuals alike never seem to take notice of his generosity and kindness, and his loyalty to friends and associates.
The intellectual scene at University of Virginia in the middle and late 1980's was alive with literary and hermeneutical theory. Postmodernism ruled in "the discourse of the human sciences", above all in the Theory Group, a monthly seminar that promoted the new French thought, and in philosophical theology, where I ended up. Many lunches in the Colonnade Club dragged into the late afternoon with languorous conversations on logo-centrism, differance, and the being of God when God is not being God. (To his credit, Robert Scharlemann, the director of the philosophical theology program, was always quick to say he "preferred his Hegel and Heidegger straight.")
Rorty was right in the middle of it all, of course, having the time of his life. But he was not at all your usual po-mo wannabe with black jeans and gravity-defying haircut. Rorty preferred khakis, a wrinkled dress shirt and striped tie with Windsor knot, and a navy blazer he threw on a chair whenever he entered the classroom. Rorty wanted us to know that reading books and discussing theory must do more than make us interesting; books and theories should make us compassionate citizens. While critics replied that his attempts to edify were disingenuous, considering how the man was so famously under mining the moral foundations of the West, Rorty's words were well aimed at a generation of graduate students living in Reagan's America, concerned more about its psycho-sexual adventures than the staggering numbers of homeless and unemployed. Rorty criticized French philosophers like Michel Foucault for "a dryness produced by a lack of identification with any social context, any communication,"1 a criticism he drolly recast in his 1997 Massey Lectures at Harvard, published recently as Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America: "Disengagement from practice produces theoretical hallucinations."2 Rorty spared no punch in his attack on the contemporary academy, which he accused of siding with the etherealized politics of the cultural Left over the real politics of the reformist, activist Left.3
He also weighed in on the debates about postmodernism and religion currently in vogue. To the darlings of deconstructionist theology, for whom the death of God and the disappearance of the self created brave new possibilities for religious thought, Rorty's "old-fashioned atheism" was like a cold slap to the face. "I believe when you die you rot," he said one fine spring afternoon in the West Pavilion lecture room in response to a paper by Mark C. Taylor, author of such influential books as De-constructing Theology and Erring: A Postmodern A/theology.
For my money, that memorable afternoon in Charlottesville in 1989 marked the end of the deconstructionist theology movement. It was not quite the momentous "black day" in August 1914, when 93 German professors and writers proclaimed their support of the war policy of Wilhelm II; the day Karl Barth realized he could no longer follow the direction of nineteenth-century Protestant theology—"their ethics and dogmatics or their understanding of the Bible and of history." But it was close. In 15 minutes Rorty did more to dramatize the poverty of liberalism (and its recent incarnation, the theological deconstructionist) than the whole Yale School had done in three decades.
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