Brian Dijkema, ‘Beauty and the Best of It’, Cardus (6 June 2011).
This article briefly reviews one of my favourite books on ‘theology and culture’ of recent years...
John G. Stackhouse, Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
... as well as a new book I have not come across before now...
Gregory Wolfe, Beauty Will Save the World: Recovering the Human in an Ideological Age (ISI Books, 2011).
According to Dijkema, both offer ‘unique and surprisingly similar responses to the question of Christ and culture – responses worthy of engagement’.
He nicely captures the thrust of Stakchouse’s preference for ‘Christian realism’:
‘If we are indeed living in a good world which has been created good by God – a world where we are divinely commanded to live and work – and if that world has been tainted deeply by sin, we must write with the knowledge that evil is present and that we are implicated in that evil. We are not God, yet we are saved, and we must act.’
But it’s helpful, he says, to read Wolfe against Stackhouse for two reasons: ‘first, Wolfe’s book actually provides an example of how one community of Christians – Christian artists – are working out what it means to live and work faithfully; and second, because it fills in several gaps left by Stackhouse’.
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