Aesthetics

Father Jake's blog tends to discuss to focus a lot on the current controversies in the Episcopal Church, but check out this entry that is a response to a recent New Yorker Article by Tobias Wolff on the power of aesthetics.

And what drew me back, some time later, toward the possibility of faith? Poetry. George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins and T. S. Eliot. One night, I was reading the last lines of “Little Gidding” to a friend, my voice thick with emotion, and when I looked up he was staring at me with kindly amusement. “So,” he said. “You really like that stuff?” (Wolff as quoted by Fr. Jake)

That's the thing about aesthetics: different people respond to the same signs and symbols differently. When we make the decision to, say, sing one hymn and not another, we have already privileged a certain set of tastes over another.

-t