Theology That Bites Back
“Bloom implies that all popular music ‘has the beat of sexual intercourse.’ Taking exactly the same view, Steven Tyler of the hard rock band Aerosmith boasts: ‘It’s rhythm and blues, its twos and fours, it’s f***ing.’ In general, neither friend nor foe acknowledges that the monotonous beat of hard rock (and, indeed, of much rap) …
“I do not use the word popular as the opposite of high, serious, or good. It cannot be stated too often, or too emphatically, that this usage is both illogical and ahistorical. In every period and place, it is possible to cite works that possess both popularity and artistic merit” (Martha Bayles, Hole in our …
“Now, some people believe that this topic was dispatched by the late political philosopher Allan Bloom, whose best-selling critique of higher education, The Closing of the American Mind, contains a chapter on the pernicious effects of rock. But as I shall show later, that celebrated chapter displays a near-perfect ignorance of American popular music (whose …
“It is still possible to find the tough, affirmative spirit of the blues in contemporary forms. But increasingly, that spirit is rejected in favor of antimusical, antisocial antics that would be laughable if they weren’t so offensive” (Martha Bayles, Hole in our Soul, p. 3).
“A breach has been made with the past, which allows us to envisage a new aspect of architecture corresponding to the technical civilization of the age we live in; the morphology of dead styles has been destroyed; and we are returning to honesty of thought and feeling” (Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, …
“Individual imagination and fancy will more and more take possession of the technical resources of the new architecture, of its spatial harmonies, of its functional qualities, and will use them as the ground work, or rather framework, of a new beauty which will crown this expected renascence with splendour” (Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and …
“The Augustinian theology and philosophy of history with their intense realization of the burden of inherited evil under which the human race laboured and their conception of divine grace as a continually renewed source of supernatural energy which transforms human nature and changes the course of history—all this had become part of the spiritual patrimony …
“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 …
“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, …
“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 …
