Faith and Aesthetics

A few years ago Frank Burch Brown published Good Taste, Bad Taste, Christian Taste. I got it because the title was incredibly catchy to my ear. What I thought was going to be a little bit of fluff and perhaps a humorous discussion of tacky music and worship turned out to be a much more dense discussion of the aesthetics of art and tastefulness in relation to faith and worship. It took me months to get through the book.

So when I came across an article by Burch in the Century, I knew what not to expect. Drawn from his newest book Inclusive yet discerning: navigating worship artfully, the piece drew heavily on some informal research Burch has done in his classes at Christian Theological Seminary (Indianapolis). Burch has written a paraphrase of the 23rd Psalm which can be sung to the tune "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer."

Take a minute...

No that that's out of your system...

Whether you agree or disagree with the notion of this paraphrase, it is an incredibly useful tool to use to get at why words and music are so compelling for anyone and people of faith especially. Using this paradigm Burch is attempting to give us language to discuss our worship and music likes and dislikes with intelligence and with common language and definitions.

Burch's work is a deeply helpful attempt to give the church and its leaders and the people in the pew a way to talk about what they experience at worship that goes beyond "like" and don't like." Not that the average person in the pew is going to be able or interested in plowing through the final product (the two referenced books). But if a congregation is struggling with this issue and wants some meaty reading to help chart the arc of the discussion, these are the books to read.

The past few weeks we have had several opportunities to experience styles of music that may give us pause. The experiences have opened up numerous conversations. And try as I might I still flounder st times trying to move the conversation beyond the like and dislike stage. (I also have to try to move folks beyond a sense of worship being about or for the individual and appealing to their tastes, but that's another post.)

The article in Century was fascinating. I hope I can get the book sometime and explore Burch's discussion further.