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

Anglican Theological Review, Summer 2002 by Saliers, Don E

Save a personal copy of this article and quickly find it again with Furl.net. It’s free! Save it. Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste: Aesthetics in Religious Life. By Frank Burch Brown. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. xx + 312 pp. $39.95 (cloth).

Anyone familiar with discussions of “taste” and its disputability will find this book uncommonly interesting. Readers interested in relations between art and religion, and specifically in the persistent lovers’ quarrel between Christian theology and works of human imagination, will find these pages provocative and stimulating. Along the way we encounter a wide range of figures in the history of aesthetic theory and religious reflection, with Blake, Kierkegaard, Kant, and especially St. Augustine, as dominant voices.

How shall we love both holiness and beauty, both God and art? This question is at the heart of Burch Brown’s inquiry. Beginning with an insightful critical tour of theories of art and aesthetics with attention to Romanticism, the book is indebted to, but always moving beyond, various “purist” views. Succinct summaries abound: “As a special form of expression or as a special use of language, art offers something like a semblance of lived experience, or the world imagined freshly and uniquely by means of fictions and sensuously embodied ideas: organic wholes whose meanings are felt more than thought” (p. 83). This can be said of both strict and moderate purists. His summaries are often wittily expressed. Thus, any theory of art that leaves out the possibility for connection with life, moral and religious, is “too pure for its own good” (p. 86).

An impressive range of examples from nearly all the arts may be found here: opera, painting, architecture, fiction, and poetry, and above all, music. In this sense the book may be read as a compendium of reflective insights drawn from the author’s wide-ranging sensibility One particularly interesting feature of Burch Brown’s analysis of “taste” is his attention to “kitsch,” both sacred and non-sacred. Moving beyond the standard distinctions between “high” and low” art (and taste), the author seeks a new way of raising questions of aesthetic quality-a way at once “pluralistic and nonelitist without being indiscriminate and irresponsible, either aesthetically or theologically” (p. 137). This is a difficult task. A democratic sensibility renders questions of excellence radically contextual, and the use of the term “taste” problematic, as his discussion of kitsch illustrates.

The book proposes a generous ecumenical framework for practicing an inclusive yet discriminating way of appreciating and making critical judgments within a Christian context of life and worship. In the end, twelve working assumptions in the exercise of “Christian taste” are formulated (pp. 250-251), with some specific applications in the final two chapters. His proposals represent a generous approach to moral and theological appreciation and critique of the arts. The book names the tensions facing any formation of Christian taste amidst increasingly complex postmodern interpretation of the arts. Despite a certain diffusion of focus, Burch Brown has opened a way for a Christian theology to rejoin the ongoing task of culture critique, setting forth a broad agenda for Christian aesthetics.

DON E. SALIERS

Emory University

Atlanta, Georgia

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Summer 2002 Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved

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