Our Thursday night chit-chat group got together last night to discuss two articles from First Things:
I wrote about Freedom and Decency last week (scroll down), and after our discussion, I stand by most of my comments. One thing that we dove into, and were very critical of, was Hart’s elitism. First, he believes only certain people are “properly trained” to decide what is and isn’t decent. Second, he creates a line between “high art” and “low art.” Ulysses, despite attempts in the United States to censor it, is acceptable to Hart because it is such a “great” piece of literature, but most forms of contemporary art don’t pass his litmus test, and are therefore indecent. He really should just say what means — he believes that high art is dying in the post-modern world and he doesn’t like it.
The discussion about Church as Culture wasn’t nearly as animated, primarily because of our reformed tendencies. Wilken advocates a distinctly Catholic perspective on the Chuch being visible in the world through cultural forms (his examples: language, architecture, and the calendar). The Reformation did it’s best to destroy every one of those forms, and I don’t we’re anxious to re-embrace them. And, as one of us pointed out, these forms didn’t do much to maintain the Church’s presence in culture. But his point was well-taken — there was a time when the Church was a driving cultural force (for good and bad). The question remains: how can the Church influence and shape culture in the post-modern world.
Posted on 5 November 2004