Word: church
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...native of Houston and longtime member of the city’s 8000-strong, traditionally-black Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church, Johnson was raised in a highly religious African-American family. Growing up, he would spend at least three days a week at church, attending choir rehearsals, Bible studies, and oftentimes daylong series of services on Sundays...
...communicate beauty”—masked an exercise in negative aesthetics. No tourist will ever mistake the Vatican for the MoMA; the church’s vision for a new art seems mostly to be an art that won’t offend said church...
...shake-ups with thriller writer Dan Brown, including last year’s totally straight-faced denunciation of “The Da Vinci Code” as an “offense against God.” (The spats tend to come off as amusing largely because the church takes him far more seriously than the rest of the world does.) Yet it’s hard to imagine Brown—or previous bête noire J.K. Rowling—creating a work of such potency as to produce the existential symptoms the Pope fears...
...question of whether such a work exists at all is a valid one. If it does, the church has remained mum. As insistent as it is on passing judgment, the Vatican remains troublingly resistant to singling out any genuinely serious modern art or literature to criticize. Hand-waving vaguely at “contemporary representations of beauty,” or straw-manning Ron and Harry, is far easier than starting a real debate about what role religion can play in the arts. So far, the church’s reaction to complex—if provocative—creative...
Even if it had taken aim at any truly idea-rich art, the church would do well to be wary. Nearly every time the clergy has tried to peg something as “illusory and deceitful” in the past, it’s been forced to engage in copious backtracking—picking out “good art” is always something of a dice toss. For proof, the Pope would simply have had to look up. Michelangelo’s altar fresco “The Last Judgment,” a fundamental background...