Next on the List

Books to read, that is. Pick it up: Beauty Will Save the World
Recovering the Human in an Ideological Age, by Gregory Wolfe
From ISI:

We live in a politicized time. Culture wars and increasingly partisan conflicts have reduced public discourse to shouting matches between ideologues. But rather than merely bemoaning the vulgarity and sloganeering of this era, says acclaimed author and editor Gregory Wolfe, we should seek to enrich the language of civil discourse. And the best way to do that, Wolfe believes, is to draw nourishment from the deepest sources of culture: art and religious faith. ...

Beauty Will Save the World offers a revealing introduction to the artists and thinkers who are the Christian humanists of the modern era, from well-known figures like Evelyn Waugh and Wendell Berry to lesser-known authors like Shusaku Endo, Andrew Lytle, and Geoffrey Hill. A section on visual artists Mary McCleary, Fred Folsom, and Makoto Fujimura (accompanied by reproductions of their works) demonstrates that there are artists who can reimagine the Western tradition in strikingly contemporary terms. Finally, Wolfe pays tribute to the conservative thinkers who served as his mentors: Russell Kirk, Gerhart Niemeyer, Marion Montgomery, and Malcolm Muggeridge— all of whom rejected rigid ideology and embraced culture and tradition.

When I read a review of this book, it immediately struck a chord. The alarming paucity of cultural appreciation, as well as the gradual elimination of the authentically beautiful within vast swaths of Catholic life, most especially at the parish level in America, is a topic of paramount concern to me. It's not just the lackluster homilies and the bizarre blurring of the line between priest and laity during Mass that cause great alarm (and distraction) for many Catholics. It's also the preponderance of kitsch, with saccharine, silly songs, and the across-the-board disappearance of reverence, mystery and solemnity, that make much of modern liturgical life so unbearable.

The bar has been lowered, not just in the arena of what we are expected to know in terms of catechesis and the basics of the faith, but also in what we allow ourselves to be formed by in the cultural sense as Catholics, what we see, read and hear. To recognize this, or to single it out as a problem to be addressed, is often cast as a sign of snobbery and elitism, which kind of proves the point that we have lost touch with our identity and culture. The arts and our cultural patrimony were never originally intended to remain in the rarefied category of specialized interests of the upper class and ivory tower academics. The beautiful art that exists in all of Rome's churches, for example, was largely aimed at helping to catechize the poor and those who were illiterate, etc., as well as helping to elevate everyone's eyes and souls upward towards heaven.