The Problem of Worldly Art

Here’s a question: How much secular culture can you live with and enjoy, without becoming an unwitting secularist? I mean: functionally not Catholic.

I admit I don’t know. Recent history clearly shows the inexorable flow of the worst of secular culture, like lava from Kilauea, is scorching traditional Judeo-Christian life. You know what I mean; no need to recite a litany of profane outrages.

Anyway, my concern is with how a devout Catholic may watch and listen and even appreciate contemporary arts and culture without succumbing to embedded premises antithetical to faith.

Of course, we must always remember the faith and its transforming power. Jesus said, “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” (Luke 5:32) And we’re all sinners. Remember too that Christ ate and drank with “those” people. The folks at Levi’s banquet (Luke again: 5:29-39) are pretty much the ones who today churn out much of what passes for popular culture: Hollywood, Madison Avenue and other parts of New York – and the rest of these United States.

The sludge is pervasive. You feast on the Super Bowl or the World Series and you’ll get extra helpings of woke-ness and immorality that, if you’re not steeled against it, can ruin the games and, slowly, slowly your life too.

Click here to read the rest of Mr. Miner’s column at The Catholic Thing . . .