Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste Aesthetics in Religious Life

by Brown, Frank Burch

• ISBN13: 9780195158724
• ISBN10: 0195158725
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-02-20
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Christians frequently come into conflict with themselves and others over such matters as music, popular culture, and worship style. Yet they usually lack any theology of art or taste adequate to deal with aesthetic disputes. In this provocative book, Frank Burch Brown offers a constructive,"ecumenical" approach to artistic taste and aesthetic judgment--a non-elitist but discriminating theological aesthetics that has "teeth but no fangs." While grounded in history and theory, this book takes up such practical questions as: How can one religious community accommodate a variety of artistic tastes? What good or harm can be done by importing music that is worldly in origin into a house of worship? How can the exercise of taste in themaking of art be a viable (and sometimes advanced) spiritual discipline? In exploring the complex relation between taste, religious imagination, and faith, Brown offers a new perspective on what it means to be spiritual, religious, and indeed Christian.

Author Biography

Frank Burch Brown is Frederick Doyle Kershner Professor of Religion and the Arts at Christian Theological Seminary. He is author of Religious Aesthetics (1989) and Transfiguration: Poetic Metaphor and the Languages of Religious Belief (1983). He is also a composer and a director of a graduate program in church music.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Religious Taste	ix
Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste	3	(23)
Art in Christian Traditions	26	(36)
From the Love of Religion to the Love of Art	62	(33)
The Taste for Art and the Thirst for God	95	(33)
Kitsch, Sacred and Profane: The Question of Quality	128	(32)
Ecumenical Taste: The Case of Music	160	(39)
Making Sacred Places, and Making Places Sacred	199	(18)
Styles and Stages of Faith and Art I: The Next Stage	217	(35)
Styles and Stages of Faith and Art II: Practicing Christianity Artfully	252	(19)
Notes	271	(30)
Index	301