LOLSaints

This image makes me want to cry :(

Jimmy Akin Article:

http://www.jimmyakin.org/2008/05/why-is-christia.html

That's a question that's worth asking.

I mean, it isn't as if Christian art has always been lame. A visit to the Sistine Chapel or a read through Dante or a listen to Mozart will tell you that.

But for some reason, right in the here and now, an enormous amount of Christian art--whether visual, literary, or musical--is just really, really lame.

And it's not driving the culture the way it used to.

Instead, it feels like a shallow copy of secular culture.

That's something explored in a recent article at Salon.Com. Here's the money quote:

For faith, the results can be dangerous. A young Christian can get the idea that her religion is a tinny, desperate thing that can't compete with the secular culture. A Christian friend who'd grown up totally sheltered once wrote to me that the first time he heard a Top 40 station he was horrified, and not because of the racy lyrics: "Suddenly, my lifelong suspicions became crystal clear," he wrote. "Christian subculture was nothing but a commercialized rip-off of the mainstream, done with wretched quality and an apocryphal [sic] insistence on the sanitization of reality."

SOURCE [WARNING: There are a few just plain gross references in the article.]

The article largely focuses on culture schlock in Evangelical circles, but we all know the same thing is true in Catholic circles, as the insipid folk-esque musical spoutings of Oregon Catholic Press or the chunky abstract patterns that pass for stained glass windows in many parishes reveal. Those are just cheesy ripoffs of secular music and secular art (and dated ripoffs at that.)

So why isn't contemporary Christian art better than it is?