“Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing concentric circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird” (Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to …
Galloping Legalism
“We should therefore see that there are two types of order. When a formal church is unhealthy, it is because their arrangement is the order of china figurines on a shelf. When a formal church is obedient and healthy it is because their arrangement is that of well-disciplined troops preparing themselves for battle. An opposing …
Piety in the Rat Race
“I do not insist that you live in the mountains and the deserts but that you be good and moderate and chaste, while dwelling in the midst of the city” (Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew).
Let Us Make a Name
“And it is this solidarity in a name, this unity in separation from God, which was to keep men from ever again being separated on earth. And the sign and symbol of this enterprise is the city they wanted to build together” (Ellul, The Meaning of the City, p. 16).
An Artistic Clerisy
“Composers, artists, or architects in a compound began to have the instincts of the medieval clergy, much of whose activity was devoted exclusively to separating itself from the mob. For mob, substitute bourgeoisie—and here you have the spirit of avant-gardism in the twentieth century. Once inside a compound, an artist became part of a clerisy, …
Regimented, In Other Words
“In 1 Corinthians 14:40, Paul requires, among other things, that everything be done according to taxis, according to order. He is not just discouraging chandalier-swinging, he is requiring something else, of a different kind, in its place. The word means ‘arrangement; order; a fixed succession observing also a fixed time; orderly array [in a military …
Conflict Early On
But “we can already perceive the extraordinary declaration that the city is the great enemy of the church” (Jacques Ellul, The Meaning of the City, p. 15).
Ugly Is As Ugly Does
“O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, has there ever been another place on earth where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested as within thy blessed borders today? I doubt it seriously. Every child goes to school in a …
Orthodusty
“The one thing needful, as C.S. Lewis once argued, is represented by a Middle English word solempne, which expresses something which is desperately needed in our worship. On either side of this solempne, we have this error or that one. Either we are right out there on the cutting edge with worship teams, a thumpin’ …
Is the Moon Really Necessary?
“Therefore to talk of not seeing the need for the Church is like talking of not seeing the need for the moon. The Church, like the moon, is not a human project, but a divine creation” (Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind, p. 119).