In my younger days I used to read men like Gaebelein with some anxiety. I did not and could not have articulated my misgivings, but there were in my imagination two discrete things: art and religion.

I knew full well that they weren't always discrete things; they had somehow divorced. I'd seen enough art to know better, and even in my dad's study there was for as long as I could remember a print of Dürer's Saint Jerome in His Study. I was by that time aware of the better-known works of Dürer, Grünewald, Rembrandt, Bosch, Brueghel, Chagall; and of course I knew about Bach, Handel, Milton, Bunyan, Dante....

But this is not the sort of thing one talked about at church. You might discuss this with a few friends and cousins, but never with deacons and Sunday School teachers. So when I started reading evangelicals on "the aesthetic imperative", I felt there was something a bit oily about them.

Now of course we live in the wasteland full of marauding cretins like Garlock, Dino, Leith Anderson, Hybels, Makujina, Mark Driscoll...and I wonder whatever became of this wonderful aesthetic imperative.

Now it seems imperative that we find an aesthetic!

Rachel is seriously mistaken if she thinks that she could love God if she attended services at St. Peter's; and if she had a clue as to the role Dr. Tetzel played in its making, she'd find only one more reason to be disdainful of Christianity.

The question remains for the professing believer:

What's with all the garbage, dude? Why is there no aesthetic imperative for you? You have your shabby entertainments and your "arts ministries" but you fool no one. These are pathetic imitations of worldly entertainments. On your very best day you are third-rate. You've got your goofball evangelistic skits and Thomas Kinkade; you have your fundamentalists howling over Oscar Wilde and your wannabe rappers. You've got your Walt Disney Lawgivers. But what have you ever created that left some atheist "wondering if God had a hand in it"?

Does this even matter to you?