Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste, by Frank Burch Brown
Frank Burch Brown is a writer capable of shifting his focus in the space of a few pages from the magnificence of Byzantine worship in tenth-century Constantinople to the Precious Moments Chapel outside Branson, Missouri, which opened to visitors 1,002 years later. In the course of this wide-ranging exploration of the relationship between art and religion, he offers perceptive critiques of John Ruskin's quasi-religious aestheticism, Immanuel Kant's defense of aesthetic autonomy and Mircea Eliade's analysis of sacred space. He also advances his argument for "critical pluralism" in the aesthetic realm by citing the music of Duke Ellington, U2 and the Indigo Girls. The religious dimension of the aesthetic, Burch shows, is no less evident in a story by James Baldwin or a poem by Sylvia Plath than in the music of the church.
Brown's book deserves a wide reading, not just among pastors and church musicians but also among laypeople, for its catholicity and concreteness. Since collections of serious essays in religious aesthetics are few, to say that Good Taste is among the best recent books on its topic is not to say very much. Nor does the author quite deliver on all of the promises made in his opening chapters. Still, the freshness of Brown's approach and the connections he draws between theology, aesthetics and culture make his book valuable.
As holder of a chair in religion and the arts at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, Brown has evidently listened carefully to students and colleagues who stand opposed in the worship wars--the stalwart defenders of Lutheran chorales firing verbal sallies against the advocates of synthesizer pop, those who are ready to take up their scourges and drive the drums from the sanctuary, glowering at their fellow parishioners who want to sell the organ for scrap metal. In this study he tries to rise above such skirmishes by embedding issues related to music in worship within a broader context of aesthetic experience and its relation to religious meaning and practice.
