John, just read this before quitting for the night, and looked over my shoulder because I thought you must have been reading my notes!.

Taking a step back from your point here so that I can see some you made earlier, the deepest cultural and aesthetic impoverishmnet, in my experience, is in Evangelicalism and in the new churches in particular. The older traditions have much more richness. And it is this that is part of my journey at present. I’m not bemoaning any lack of creativity per se from modernism and agree with you that in the massively expanded arena of opportunity perceived from the enlightenment that artists and others have produced monumental works.

I agree too about the quality of much that happens today and that the dominant aesthetic industries are churning out products that are simple cosmetically differentiated versions of what the marketeers say works at a commercial level. It’s probably another outworking of McCluhan’s line that in the global village every town will become a suburb of every other town, a sort of global, or at least western homogenisation.

On the emergence of a meaningful aesthetic, the short answer is that I don’t see it happening yet. Which is no reason not to declare something about it. But I would suggest that at least in missiological terms, this might be about looking very seriously at the church as a cultural agency and as culturally prophetic and that if we leave out of that task the aesthetic toolkit, we will probably end up engineering something no less ugly than what exists.

If you haven’t seen my other main piece from Which Art in Heaven, it might be helpful because there I describe a few modal approaches to looking at the arts in more missional terms.

I partly suggest this, I admit, because I have just watched United 93 with a friend and am emotionally devastated, as well as slightly cream crackered.

More later.