A Buffalo ’66 Theology of Culture
July 17, 2012 By Daniel A. Siedell (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/cultivare/) We live in a bipolar and schizophrenic culture. On one hand it is extremely crude and licentious and on the other, excruciatingly puritanical and legalistic. A robust and mature Christian cultural witness recognizes that this is two sides of the same coin, and thus resists the temptation to reduce the radicality of the gospel into “Christian virtues” that are then applied to artistic and other cultural practices in an effort to regulate and maintain an aesthetic of public decency (i.e., eliminate penises, breasts, and four-letter words). But a robust and mature Christian cultural witness must be built on a theology of culture that is not fooled by what is seen, that is, what is obvious artistically, but attend to what is heard, the “sound” that emerges gradually from painting, poem, song, or film. An artist I have known for over a decade once told me that “paintings tend to distract us with how they look.”...