Introduction: Faith and Culture
Summer 2021
Faith and Culture
Restoring Faith in Culture
D. C. Schindler“[C]ulture is the faith made visible, and being visible is the heart of the faith in the God who made himself visible in Christ.”
John Paul II’s Core Teaching on Culture (1979–1980)
John P. Hittinger“This deep aspiration of the human spirit for God and the meaning of existence, as well as the expression of this quest in various ways, is the heart of culture.”
Joseph Ratzinger’s Trinitarian Theology of Culture
Tracey Rowland“The idea of jettisoning ‘the speech of Christian centuries’ and ‘the language of the angels’ for a language ‘as contemporary as the Beatles’ affects all dimensions of culture.”
The Priority of Peace and the Problem of Power
Andrew Willard Jones“As the father guides the son deeper into virtue through the son’s obedience, through his good inclinations, his particular instantiation of the virtues, so the prince serves as a father to the city itself.”
What is Music? On the Form and Performance of Beauty
Paul Tyson“In some sense, the musician performs a priestly function in mediating between our mundane existence and our transcendent yearnings.”
Is There a Christian Art? Soundings in Catholic Art Theory since the Schlegels
Aidan Nichols“[E]very Christian art . . . will be animated by the life of Christianity such that it will be impossible to say where the sheerly artistic means of working end and the Christian inspiration begins.”
Retrieving the Tradition
Corporeal Memory: The Concrete Things of History as Living Reminders
Josef Pieper“It is because we are embodied spirits that we truly and completely come to know something only when our feet and hands know what to do and are able to do it.”
The Art of the Fugue: Paralipomena to a Performance
Hans Urs von Balthasar“The freedom of the bound order is greater than the freedom of the lone voice.”
On the Cultural Mission of the Church
Hans Urs von Balthasar“The significance of our deeds flows from silence and contemplation.”