Carson Holloway is concerned about the triumph of vulgarity in rock music. He wrote a book about it called All Shook Up: Music, Passion and Politics. For those of you interested in having as broad a base as possible, I would recommend your reading it. He deals with the views of Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau and Nietzsche and treats them as general categories, contrasting views of how music might be used. This would be a good background, a helpful framework that might keep you from saying silly things in public. It will help you think straight.

If you are looking for a guide to what makes a good liturgy, you'll be left to make the connection between theory and practice. You might want to give it a pass.

I don't agree with everything in it; on the whole I think Abraham Kaplan is as much if not more help, but the categories Holloway will walk you through are well worth knowing. Maybe you could put it toward the middle of your reading list.

But I thought about his book when I read some comments recently about the making of judgments about church music. The writer thought these were personal, subjective preferences which should not be imposed on others. I think this is puzzling, I think it is careless, but mostly I think it is worldly.

Ask yourself: What if a personal, subjective preference is right or true? Am I obligated to submit to it because it is true, or am I excused from submitting to it because someone holds it as a personal, subjective preference? Misapprehending the problem is the surest way to miss a remedy.

What if music can disorder the soul? Isn't that what should concern us rather than who holds what opinion?

We are going to get absolutely nowhere if we ignore a truth because it is also someone's opinion.

At any rate, this is how Holloway closes his book:

The solution to our musical and moral difficulties, as we have suggested, is at hand; the musical political philosophy of the ancients that, by enthroning reason in the soul, harmonizes the whole soul and provides for its truest happiness. Our relief at the presence of a solution, however, is tempered by our recognition of its costliness. As we have seen, music's ability to harmonize the soul is intelligible and plausible only in light of the classical assertion of the centrality of reason in human nature, the rational order of the cosmos, and reason's natural attraction to that order and desire to make it present in our thought and action. Yet such beliefs are not widely held today; and where they are professed, they do not seem to be taken with great seriousness. Our embrace of the ancient solution would require a radical transformation in our understanding of what we are, what the universe is, and how we are related to it. The necessity of such a transformation is clear. Whether we are capable of it, or even willing to try, remains to be seen.

I am interested in whether music harmonizes the whole soul and provides for true happiness. That is important to me. I am interested in the triumph of vulgarity in rock music. But I'm also interested in the triumph of triviality in our liturgy. And that's what we have been talking about here.

I'm going to suggest that Holloway's summary applies to our current liturgical scandal. If we don't have quite a triumph of vulgarity in the most objectionable sense, we certainly do have a triumph of triviality in every conceivable sense.

As we consider what passes for Christian art these days, as we observe the environment in which people worship, and as we reflect on how people talk about God, some of us are rightly distressed. If Greene, Hamilton, Peretti and Sawyer represent the Christian imagination, then we are in dire straits. We'll need a radical transformation in our understanding of what we are, what God is like and how we relate to him.

Surely this can't be just a matter of private opinion.