Good Taste, Bad Taste, & Christian Taste: Aesthetics in Religious Life

Christians frequently come into conflict with themselves and others over such matters as music, popular culture, and worship style. Yet they usually lack any theology of art or taste adequate to deal with aesthetic disputes. In this provocative book, Frank Burch Brown offers a constructive, "ecumenical" approach to artistic taste and aesthetic judgment--a non-elitist but discriminating theological aesthetics that has "teeth but no fangs."

While grounded in history and theory, this book takes up such practical questions as: How can one religious community accommodate a variety of artistic tastes? What good or harm can be done by importing music that is worldly in origin into a house of worship? How can the exercise of taste in the making of art be a viable (and sometimes advanced) spiritual discipline? In exploring the complex relation between taste, religious imagination, and faith, Brown offers a new perspective on what it means to be spiritual, religious, and indeed Christian.

"Burch Brown has opened a way for a Christian theology to rejoin the ongoing task of culture critique, setting forth a broad agenda for Christian aesthetics."--Anglican Theological Review

"A provocative analysis, sure to open new lines of dialogue between artists and believers."--Booklist

"Some philosophers have dealt seriously with the difficult problem of taste. If there is another treatment as extensive as this one, I am not aware of it...As an intelligent and learned guide for those dealing with the use of art and music in the church, this book is, as far as I know, incomparable."--Theology Today

"Frank Burch Brown, F.D. Kerschner Professor of Religion and the Arts and Christian Theological Seminary, has written a book that is important for churches seeking to understand themselves better and to more faithfully express their common loyalty to Jesus Christ. Not only does it help in understanding the diversity of taste and contribute to an informed reflection on likes and dislikes in grassroots religious communities, but it also is a serious theological consideration of aesthetics for criticism and dialogue in the so-called secular world."--Mid-Stream

"Seldom are complexity and clarity, knowledge and commitment, religious generosity and concreteness, faith and pluralism so evident as in this volume."--ARTS

"His significant contribution is in framing love of art and music with love of neighbor and showing how the one must deepen and develop the other if each is to be authentic."--Liturgical Ministry, Volume 11, Summer 2002

"Burch Brown has opened a way for Christian theology to rejoin the ongoing task of culture critique, setting forth a broad agenda for Christian aesthetics." --Anglican Theological Review, Summer 2002

"Brown enfolds, true to the times and the academic spirit, a host of religious traditions and denomenations, seating them as equals at a round table....[he] stops short of any final moral judgment, for he is too much the scholar and too little the preacher to do so."--American Organist

"Burch Brown has opened a way for a Christian theology to rejoin the ongoing task of culture critique, setting forth a broad agenda for Christian aesthetics."--Anglican Theological Review

-A lively examination of the role of aesthetics in religion and spirituality.

Frank Burch Brown is Frederick Doyle Kershner Professor of Religion and the Arts at Christian Theological Seminary. He is author of Religious Aesthetics (1989) and Transfiguration: Poetic Metaphor and the Languages of Religious Belief (1983). He is also a composer and a director of a graduate program in church music.