"If Christians cannot communicate as thinking beings, they are reduced to encountering one another only at the shallow level of gossip and small talk. Hence the perhaps peculiarly modern problem - the loneliness of the thinking Christian." - Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind
Art is being privatized, with each of us striving to remain faithful to visions of beauty that we are no longer confident of sharing outside the circle of our friends. One cause of this is the democratic culture, which is hostile to judgment in any form, and in particular to the judgment of taste. The prevailing attitude is that you are entitled to your tastes, but not entitled to inflict them on me.
Tom Gilson thinks Scruton is helpful in explaining why bad art gets good treatment.
Andy at Think Christian points to a Touchstone Magazine article about why evangelical authors aren't writing books of lasting literary value and what they can learn from Flannery O'Connor.
We have become irrelevant. Many contemporary Christians tend to make one of three errors when dealing with art: One, we declare anything that doesn’t explicitly proselytize, anything that depicts brokenness without redemption to be depraved or unworthy of Christian notice. Or two, we decide that the secular world really does have better art, so we copy it, boldly and without apology or thought into our own creativity. Or three, we try so hard to be relevant that we adopt the attitude and worldview of the culture that surrounds us—instead of being the proverbial salt and light, we end up as dust with nothing to offer in the way of hope, because there is only a perfunctory difference between those of us who claim to follow Christ and those who don’t.
My eyes welled with tears when I caught this story on the news yesterday but it didn't occur to me to mention it here until I received an email linking to the video from a friend who rarely sends such things. I agree with his decision to depart from his practice in this case.
The video is of a mobile phone salesman named Paul Potts who recently appeared on the television program "Britain's Got Talent" and wowed both audience and judges (the indomitable Simon Cowell among them) with his rendition of "Nessun Dorma." His performance was beautiful not only because of his amazing talent but also because of his evident humility and passion for his art. You can read more about Paul here. Enjoy!
Donny Johnson, serving three life terms in solitary confinement for murder and slashing a prison guard's throat, creates paintings using pigmentation from M&M's, blank postcards, and a paintbrush made, in part, from strands of his own hair.
Reading this story in the New York Times reminded me of Pascal's frequent commentary on humanity's simultaneous greatness and wretchedness. By virtue of creation we are bearers of the divine image, capable of creating astounding beauty. By virtue of the fall, our hearts are inclined toward performing great evil. On account of Christ's death and resurrection, those who trust him expectantly await the restoration of creation's glory and the ability to create moral and aesthetic beauty, unhindered by the bars of our present sinfulness.
Andy Crouch at Christianity Today has an interesting take on the benefits of an increasingly visual culture:
Those of us with a professional interest in words tend to bemoan the rise of the image. Yet I'm more hopeful about visual culture than I am about, say, current musical culture, which the iPod is increasingly turning into a solitary experience of customized consumption. For the most part, visual technologies are restoring human beings to our God-given role as communal culture creators.
He's also hopeful that increased "visualcy" will lead Christians to take beauty more seriously:
The art world of the 20th century was often suspicious of beauty, preferring provocation and disruption. Worse, Christians in the 20th century often just ignored beauty—and many still do, considering that the only institution that produces uglier printed material than most church bulletins is the federal government.
I'm back in Illinois after spending the Memorial Day weekend in the Big Apple. The Lutheran school I attended from kindergarten through eighth grade celebrated its 60th year and I was invited to preach at the church service capping off the weekend's events.
There was a dinner dance Saturday evening where I caught up with friends I haven't seen for many years. My fifth grade teacher, who had taught at the school for almost 28 years, was honored and time was given to her past students to recount humorous memories as well as to express words of thanks for her influence. The first person to speak took what immediately came to my mind about my former teacher. She had a lazy left eye that looked off to the side when her right eye was looking straight ahead. She capitalized on this abnormality by situating her desk such that her left eye could see what was going on in the hall while her right eye monitored the class. We were never sure when she had an eye on you so we didn't try to get away with too much. Sometime between then and now she had corrective surgery and at 68 is just as vibrant as I remember her being when I was a kid.
I'm an uncharacteristically light sleeper the night before I have to preach. Fortunately, I don't preach weekly. Last Saturday, at about 2 AM I was tossing and turning, in part due to an old clock on the dresser of the room in which I was sleeping. Each "tick" was a voluminous reminder of the passage of time and the sleep I wasn't getting. I finally got out of bed and relocated the antique timepiece to another room. That got me thinking about the variety of ways we try to eliminate reminders that we're aging.
One of the things I read before flying to New York was an article about plastic surgery by Christine Rosen called "The Democratization of Beauty." Rosen refers to a trend among thirty-somethings called "age dropping." It's a plan to store up beauty for later decades by having "an increasing number of carefully calibrated nips, tucks, and peels performed in their thirties so that they don't end up....without an adequate supply in their winter years." Rosen observes that "age dropping" and other trends "suggest....a diminishing tolerance for imperfection and aging."
Spending time with my mom (who is, thank God, in very good health) in the house I grew up in, sleeping in the bed that belonged to my late grandparents, seeing childhood friends with teenaged children, preaching in the church I used to attend chapel services at every Wednesday with other children in uniform, and celebrating my forty-first birthday made me quite aware of my journey toward the grave at a pace that seems to have picked up considerably. Yes, we can move ticking clocks and get various parts of our anatomies nipped and tucked, but we can't fully eliminate the reminders that we have grown and are continuing to grow older. As I reflected on all this I thought of another fitting text for the occasion - Psalm 90: 12: "So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom."
