Wholeness also entails a consciousness of the indelible and delicate connection to what lies beyond ourselves, in which our personal existence is embedded and from which it is nurtured. Postmodern holism entails an integration of all the dimensions of personal life-affective and intuitive as well as cognitive. Stanley Grenz states that we search to be whole persons: Its versions are mistruths.”įrom what I have gathered through conversations with many people in the west, underlying the postmodern condition of the fragmentation left by, 1) the rejection of modern values of autonomy, rationality, and objective truth, and 2) the assertion for subjective localized and perspectival truths, what I see is fundamentally a concern for wholeness. Pars Pro Toto and Wholeness: Postmodern Concerns Tied to this is also a call to respond to this immanence, from which I will propose an ‘otherwise-than-modern’ response to postmodern immanence: a call for re-enchantment I recently advocated for in another blog published here. In what follows I would like to unpack some theological sources that govern Cloud Atlas, and show how it portrays its embrace of immanence as the reality of postmodern existence and belief.

But Cloud Atlas shows a holism without salvation, a concern for the whole person, for the whole life, for the whole reality only graspable in the part. Cloud Atlas demonstrates immanence without transcendence, an immanence that embraces the absence of liberation or hope of salvation for the present life as a finite expression of infinitude in the cycle of rebirths.Ĭloud Atlas provides insight into our contemporary belief structures, what could be called the concern for holism in postmodern belief. The six “movements” in the plot reflect a certain paradox: they describe a world of cyclical existence, yet one without liberation, one without any hope of salvation (other than our love for others). The movie Cloud Atlas weaves a complex narrative wherein the cast of characters are born, learn to love, and die, again and again. There are whole movements imagining us meeting again and again in different lives, different ages.” As souls are born and reborn, they renew their bonds to one another throughout time.“I call it the Cloud Atlas Sextet.

An attorney harbors a fleeing slave on a voyage from the Pacific Islands in 1849 a poor composer in pre-World War II Britain struggles to finish his magnum opus before a past act catches up with him a genetically engineered worker in 2144 feels the forbidden stirring of human consciousness - and so on. Actors (Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent) take on multiple roles in an epic that spans five centuries.

Cloud atlas book explained