John, still a rather rushed reply, I’m afraid, before I go out.

Not sure about a theology of aesthetics, or at least, not sure we are able to achieve such… perhaps a future generation. But we might get nearer if we were concerned about the aesthetics of theology, what I mean by this is if our theology were truly contextualised in terms of all the effects it has. It is too small and too romantic an example, but I recall the dramatisation of the work of Watson and Crick on the shape of the human genome, Watson, or was it Crick, repeatedly refused the models that emerged from their thinking because they were ugly, claiming that when the shape of the gene was discovered that it would, of necessity, have to be beautiful… and voila, the double helix.

But on the contemporary aesthetic… modernism, of course, not only created a boundless arena for aesthetics, it almost created art as Art. Art as not being politics, as not religion, as not science. And, as Woodrow Wilson was prone to remind us, the foundation of everything in the modern world, religion included, is economic. So art enters the public domain, in terms of how it is perceived and valued, in the context of a free-market-economy of ways of thinking.

Artists, however, do not, if they are any good, accept modernist categorisation, even if they work deeply in modernist ways. The arts can be deeply political, religious, and recently even inform and inspire in science. But the free market still operates. And, every November, I begin an experience of depression that deepens towards the middle of December, because Christmas has become one of the ugliest things in the western calendar. And the sound of it, in the hands of the market place, is hideous, brutal. The voice of Mammon, perhaps, shrieks at us, demands that we lay all upon the altar. And proves to us that in the market today, the consumer is not the powerful choice maker, the consumer is the raw material ground in the machine. Christmas is Soylent Green. (Just an example)

In another arena, and perhaps going much deeper, what if the people of God in the US were to seek to declare their allegiance to another King, what more aesthetic an act, and prophetic, could they make than to refuse to raise the flag on their front porches. What would happen to that gaudy pattern of confused identity, the conflation of God and the American Way?

Or even the invisible aesthetic act of novelist Iain Banks, when he cut up his passport and sent it to Tony Blair after our entry into the Gulf War?

I don’t mean this only in terms of resistance, such is often short lived and not widely affective, but if we believe that our modeling of another kingdom is communally expressed, and is expressed in our ‘other’ way of doing things, it is here that I think we have opportunity to express aesthetically what we hold morally. For those who work in the creative professions, of course, the act happens through a negotiation with the market place, with clients and focus groups. For me, the experience of evangelism in more propositional forms actually happens most often in client meetings, over issues of values and meanings of what I write or design or advocate.