Comments on Christianity and Culture

May 6th, 2008

I’ve been on a bit of a Stanley Hauerwas reading spree recently (some of which I hope to comment on here soon), so of course when I saw your discussion, Ezekiel, of the regulatory role played by the monasteries, the first thing that sprang to mind is his aphorism that “the first task of the Church is not to make the world more just, but to make the world the world.” When the ur-culture is apparently Christian, the Church can easily lose the critical distance needed to discern what in the culture in fact is or is not compatible with the Faith. So, formed as I am by Hauerwas and MacIntyre (and Pope Benedict), I think our current situation is, as you hope, an opportunity to reinvigorate the Church precisely because we can now have the distance to clearly see how deeply anti-Christian - and even anti-human - our allegedly Christian culture has been for the last couple centuries.

MacIntyre is going to be important for us because of his insights about how traditions are sustained by the formation of people in the virtues by the practices of communities (I think it is such communities he’s calling for in his famous St. Benedict passage). For too long we Christians have allowed ourselves to be formed more by the practices of a hostile culture — it’s unsurprising people cease to believe in God if they live their lives in a political, economic, and educational order whose practices not only assume but require for their plausibility that God does not exist.

No Comments

Linkblog

The Safeguarding of the Mystery
I sometimes wonder if the call of “The doors, the doors!” will once again have to be literally meant and dreadfully needed. (0)

The Now and Not Yet of American Orthodoxy
“The America of commerce and politics can never become a missionary destination, and cannot be the aim of the Gospel”. A lot of what he says applies to more than just the Orthodox. (0)

Post-postmaterialism
There is to some extent a cultural overlap between hippies, greens and American converts to Orthodoxy that is a very small phenomenon in American society, but I think it is representative of a more general trend within socially conservative Christian churches in the rising cohort of 18-29 year olds. (1)

Ancient Sacramental Winery?
The remains of a facility seemingly used for the production of sacramental wine has been found near the monestary of St. Catherine’s in the Sinai. (0)

"A Deformed Christ"
Perry Robinson on Reformed theology, the natures of Christ & more. (0)

We may regret this later.
The City & The City are now on Facebook. (It’s a “fans” page for the blog, and another way to know when we’ve updated!) (0)

I'm the very model of a modern vicar-general
I am the very model of a modern vicar-general / I’ve information liturgical, ecclesial and clerical / I quote the Popes of Latium and councils ecumenical / From Chalcedon to Vatican, with subjects esoterical. (0)

An interview with John Milbank
expands on the themes of his letter to the Guardian from a few posts back, in his usual audacious way. (0)

Art museums remain didactic extensions of the Enlightenment
“—and the locus of a free-range aestheticism. Careful explanations are not enough to breathe life into the cultural expressions of a belief system. Christian art, a handmaiden to liturgical action, loses its transformative power when it is removed from the acts of worship—prayer or ritual performance—it was made to complement. The leveling process of aesthetic appreciation is inevitable by default.” (0)

"After all, what counts as radical is not the new, but the good."
John Milbank sounds a bit Crunchy Con-ish: “Jackie Ashley … reveals the bizarre bankruptcy of the current British left. By every traditional radical criterion New Labour has failed… But never mind all that, says Jackie Ashley and her ilk: on what crucially matters - the extending of supposed biosexual freedom and the licensing of Faustian excesses of science - it is on the side of “progress”…. Yet it is arguably just this construal of left versus right which is most novel and questionable. Is it really so obvious that permitting children to be born without fathers is progressive, or even liberal and feminist? Behind the media facade, more subtle debates over these sorts of issue do not necessarily follow obvious political or religious versus secular divides. The reality is that, after the sell-out to extreme capitalism, the left seeks ideological alibis in the shape of hostility to religion, to the family, to high culture and to the role of principled elites…. Now many of us are beginning to realise that old socialists should talk with traditionalist Tories” (on a related note, this) (0)

Speaking of cities...
I wish I could be in Rome at the beginning of September… (0)

Happy Birthday G.K. Chesterton!
“Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington…” (0)

The inhumanity of the metric system
“… even when we don’t consciously think about them, units of measurement become for us the kind of “foundational” categories through which we see the world.” (2)

Interview with Fr. Rutler
Speaking of Fr. Rutler, NLM has an interview with him. (0)

"Clip-Art Scholarship"
Paleontologist Bob Bakker continues to dissect the “new atheists” over at Laelaps. (Bakker is one of my childhood heroes, one of the figures that took me from “kid fascinated with dinosaurs” to “future geology student”, so my interest is perhaps a bit personal.) (0)

The City and the City

Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum