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December 01, 2005
The medium is the message
John Milbank: It’s because the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan put it, who not accidentally was a Catholic. And obviously I’m not saying this is true of all of the American Protestant tradition, it’s obviously not. And you know the very greatest thinkers like Jonathan Edwards did just the opposite, they made aesthetics the heart of what they were thinking about. But when the culture of the mega-church and the very anti-urban culture, people who really prefer to live in a kind of no-man’s land of shopping malls and that sort of thing; they’re suspicious of downtown because it’s too corrupt and they’re happy all the time with banal restaurants, fast food, very bland kind of architecture—and to my mind this betrays the Gospel, because I think how we treat space and time is central; the whole business of sacred time and sacred landscape is essential. And one of the things I’ve noticed strongly in America is that, I believe, up to the middle of the 20th century America was a sacred landscape in that I think it had its own quite austere but very beautiful aesthetic in its modes of building and things. And that very rapidly in the last part of the 20th century the rows of strip malls and this sort of thing has produced the most incredible uglification of the landscape; and in my mind I see this as spiritual deterioration—profound deterioration—and it seems to me that the kind of religion that is at ease with that is a very strange kind of religion, because it’s not really thinking about how we are trustees of God’s land and that the beauty of the creation is the divine call to us—that the divine demands from us an adequate response.
http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=76&cview=1#cmt
Posted by houch at December 1, 2005 05:19 AM
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Comments
i just read some of his stuff on capitalism and it is amazing.
also this excerpt is great as well - i mean it's kind of a response to some of Foucault's theories about architecture and the ordering of space. but anyways very awesome.
Posted by: maureen at December 2, 2005 04:14 PM
lovely, truly lovely
Posted by: lester at December 3, 2005 06:23 AM