Last winter Patrick Deneen delivered a lecture on how university architecture had gone “From Sacred Space to the Bunker and the Spaceship,” in which he detailed how the change in university purpose over the past century had been reflected in its buildings. When universities were first and foremost places of learning in which the accumulated wisdom of the ages was to be transmitted to a new generation, they followed classical forms. Gothic architecture pointed to heaven, the source of ultimate wisdom to Christians and Platonists alike. Libraries facilitated serendipitous encounter with books, students, and scholars alike, bringing the various sciences into dialogue with each other on the shelf and in the halls. 

 As John Dewey’s ideas took hold in the classroom (fittingly at the University of Chicago’s Laboratory School), and Le Corbusier’s in the architectural journals, the orientation turned away from learning as it had classically been understood and toward a fusion of personal development for students and research accumulation for professors. Libraries were built to store “publish or perish” books that would never be read, and classrooms to become plastic spaces of generic creativity. In time, classrooms would fade from focus altogether.

Jonathan Coppage, "When University Architecture Goes Nowhere"

Near the end of The Gift of Good Land, Wendell Berry writes, “To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.” This quote, perhaps more than any other quotation from his work, gets to the heart of Berry’s vision and the purpose of his writing. Berry’s project for over 50 years has been to argue for the goodness of reverent breaking and to demonstrate its possibility.

But as Berry’s phrasing suggests, reverent breaking is not just about discrete actions, but about the kind of people we are. Most of us who exploit the world, after all, are not so vicious that we willingly do things to desecrate God’s creation. Rather, we do it through our carelessness, laziness, or ignorance, failing to recognize the connection between our actions and the health of creation. And so the real question with Berry isn’t so much how we can break creation reverently, but how we can become the sort of people capable of breaking creation reverently. And this is why Berry’s novels are so vital to understanding his work. For it is in his novels that he shows us how we can go about becoming the sort of person capable of such a relationship to the created order.

Jake Meador, "Wendell Berry's 'Room of Love'"

Christians take a very big view of redemption because they take a very big view of fallenness. If all has been created good and all has been corrupted, then all must be redeemed. God isn't content to save souls; God wants to save bodies too. God isn't content to save human beings in their individual activities; God wants to save social systems and economic structures too. If the management/labor structure contains built-in antagonism, then it needs to be redeemed. If the health care delivery system reaches only the well-to-do, then it needs to be reformed. The same goes for hostile relationships of race, gender, or class. . . .

Everything corrupt needs to be redeemed, and that includes the whole natural world, which both sings and groans. The whole natural world, in all its glory and pain, needs the redemption that will bring shalom. The world isn't divided into a sacred realm and a secular realm, with redemptive activity confined to the sacred zone. The whole world belongs to God, the whole world has fallen, and so the whole world needs to be redeemed--every last person, place, organization, and program; all "rocks and trees and skies and seas"; in fact, "every square inch," as Abraham Kuyper said. The whole creation is "a theater for the mighty works of God," first in creation and then in re-creation.

Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God's World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living 

I took to studying the ones of my teachers who were also preachers, and also the preachers who came to speak in chapel and at various exercises. In most of them I saw the old division of body and soul that I had known at The Good Shepherd [Orphanage]. The same rift ran through everything at Pigeonville College; the only difference was that I was able to see it more clearly, and to wonder at it. Everything bad was laid on the body, and everything good was credited to the soul. It scared me a little when I realized that I saw it the other way around. If the soul and body really were divided, then it seemed to me that all the worst sins--hatred and anger and self-righteousness and even greed and lust--came from the soul. But these preachers I'm talking about all thought that the soul could do no wrong, but always had its face washed and its pants on and was in agony over having to associate with the flesh and the world. And yet these same people believed in the resurrection of the body.

Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow, p. 49

From Robert Farrar Capon's The Supper of the Lamb (emphasis mine):

[God] creates in a mystery. What He holds intimately and contemporaneously in being, acts, nonetheless, for itself. The secular is not the sacred. Creation exists in its own right, is no parable, no front, no Punch and Judy show in which God plays all the parts, but a vast and raucous meeting where each thing acts out its nature, shouts I am I, as if no other thing had being. The world exists, not for what it means but for what it is. The purpose of mushrooms is to be mushrooms . . .  Things are precious before they are contributory. It is a false piety that walks through creation looking only for lessons which can be applied somewhere else. To be sure, God remains the greatest good, but, for all that, the world is still good in itself. Indeed, since He does not need it, its whole reason for being must lie in its own goodness; He has no use for it; only delight. 

Just think what that means. We were not made in God's image for nothing. The child's preference for sweets over spinach, mankind's universal love of the toothsome rather than the nutritious is the mark of our greatness, the proof that we love the secular as He does--for its secularity. We have eyes which see what He sees, lips which praise what He praises, and mouths which relish things, because He first pronounced them tov. The world is no disposable ladder to heaven. Earth is not convenient, it is good; it is, by God's design, our lawful love.

In Creation Regained, Albert M. Wolters contrasts dualistic worldviews within broad Christianity with what he calls a reformational worldview:

I would like to briefly identify the basic difference between a reformational worldview and other Christian worldviews. 

One way of seeing this difference is to use the basic definition of the Christian faith given by Herman Bavinck: "God the Father has reconciled His created but fallen world through the death of His Son, and renews it into a Kingdom of God by His Spirit." The reformational worldview takes all the key terms in this ecumenical trinitarian confession in a universal, all-encompassing sense. The terms "reconciled," "created," "fallen," "world," "renews," and "Kingdom of God" are held to be cosmic in scope. In principle, nothing apart from God himself falls outside the range of these foundational realities of biblical religion. 

All other Christian worldviews, by contrast, restrict the scope of each of these terms in one way or other. Each is understood to apply to only one delimited area of the universe of our experience, usually named the "religious" or "sacred" realm. Everything falling outside this delimited area is called the "worldly," or "secular," or "natural," or "profane" realm. All of these "two-realm" theories, as they are called, are variations of a basically dualistic worldview, as opposed to the integral perspective of the reformational worldview, which does not accept a distinction between sacred and secular "realms" in the cosmos. 

That is one way of explaining the distinctiveness of the reformational worldview. Another way is to say that its characteristic features are organized around the central insight that "grace restores nature"--that is, the redemption in Jesus Christ means the restoration of an original good creation. . . . In other words, redemption is re-creation. . . . It is plain how central the doctrine of creation becomes in such a view, since the whole point of salvation is then to salvage a sin-disrupted creation.

From Albert M. Wolters' Creation Regained:

Christians of virtually every persuasion have tended to understand "world" to refer to a delimited area of the created order, an area that is usually called "worldly" or "secular" (from saeculum, the Latin rendering of aion), which includes such fields as art, politics, scholarship (excluding theology), journalism, sports, business, and so on. In fact, to this way of thinking, the "world" includes everything outside the realm of the "sacred," which consists basically of the church, personal piety, and "sacred theology." Creation is therefore divided up neatly (although the dividing line may be defined differently by different Christians) into two realms: the secular and the sacred.

This compartmentalization is a very great error. It implies that there is no "worldliness" in the church, for example, and that no holiness is possible in politics, say, or journalism. It defines what is secular not by its religious orientation or direction (obedience or disobedience to God's ordinances) but by the creational neighborhood it occupies. Once again, it falls prey to that deep-rooted Gnostic tendency to depreciate one realm of creation (virtually all of society and culture) with respect to another, to dismiss the former as inherently inferior to the latter.

The tendency is a serious matter and has far-reaching consequences. Consider how it affects our reading of Scripture. When we read Christ's words "my kingdom is not of this world," many of us are inclined to understand it as an argument against Christian involvement in politics, for example. Instead, Jesus was saying that his kingship does not arise out of (Greek: ek) the perverted earth but derives from heaven. When James says that pure religion is to keep oneself unspotted from the world, we too easily read this as a warning against dancing or card playing or involvement in the dramatic arts on the grounds that they are simply "worldly amusements." But James is warning against worldliness wherever it is found, certainly in the church, and he is emphasizing here precisely the importance of Christian involvement in social issues. Regrettably, we tend to read the Scriptures as though their rejection of a "worldly" life-style entails a recommendation of an "otherworldly" one.

This approach has led many Christians to abandon the "secular" realm to the trends and forces of secularism. Indeed, because of their two-realm theory, to a large degree, Christians have themselves to blame for the rapid secularization of the West. If political, industrial, artistic, and journalistic life, to mention only these areas, are branded as essentially "worldly," "secular," "profane," and part of the "natural domain of creaturely life," then is it surprising that Christians have not more effectively stemmed the tide of humanism in our culture?

Much of our theology has been so concentrated on heaven that it invalidates any concern for the earth. Some images in Scripture have even been misconstrued to perpetuate a disregard for the creation, such as the image that in the last days the world will be consumed by fire. But nearly every other time the "consumed by fire" image is evoked in Scripture, it is a fire that purifies rather than burns up, a fire that frees up life rather than destroys it. No doubt, the way we live is shaped by how we imagine the end of the world--whether we think God's final plan is for everything to go up in flames or for everything to be brought back to life.

Creation care is not just about theology. It is about having the creativity to embody our theology imaginatively . . . At its core, creation care is about loving our global neighbor, because the poor suffer the most from the degradation of the earth and the struggle for clean water. For many kids in the concrete jungle of the ghettoes and slums, there can be such a disconnection from creation that they feel disconnected from the Creator.

. . . Part of what we do as we plant urban gardens is reconnect to the beauty of the earth. Kids get to see grass pierce concrete. Their eyes light up as they pull a carrot out of the ground and digging for potatoes can feel like digging for lost treasure. At the heart of it all is a God who so loved the world and who called everything in it good. Our story began in a garden, but it ends in a city--a beautiful restored city the Scriptures describe as the New Jerusalem, coming on earth as it is in heaven.

Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals, pp. 302-3

Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, ... America by Rod Dreher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I shouldn’t be doing this—too many papers to grade. But I have to get this review out of my system. So here goes.

Now that I have three children who will have to make their way in this world, I’ve found myself thinking a lot lately about the direction our culture is headed. So in the last couple years, I’ve started to read writers like Wendell Berry (What Are People For?) and others who critique American values and offer a better vision for the future. As a result, I became interested in reading Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons. I don’t think I would have been interested in this book before age 30, but a man has to grow up at some point.

Specifically, what got me interested in this book was the eighteenth-century thinker Edmund Burke. I touch on Burke’s thought in one of the classes I teach, and I’ve come to see Burkean conservatism as far superior to the crassly individualist/libertarian values of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, where economics tends to be king. That kind of conservatism has little regard for culture, aesthetics, our local communities, or creation itself. But Dreher is a Burkean.

So anyway, I picked up his book. Although the title of this book makes it sound political, Dreher isn’t really discussing politics here. He’s talking about a way of life—one that he calls “sacramental.” (As a Protestant, I would have preferred a term like “pervasively sacred,” but that’s not the issue here.)

According to Dreher, sacramental living isn’t about politics, but about recognizing the sacredness and inherent spiritual value of all people, all aspects of life, and all of creation. This includes things that we often don’t think of as sacred: our work, our families, our homes, our daily meals, our communities, and the natural world. Sacramental living simply involves recognizing and valuing the inherent dignity of these things. As we do, our daily activities take on meaning—activities like choosing where to shop (big impersonal chains vs. local merchants), deciding what to eat (food from massive factory farms vs. food provided by small, local farms where the people have an affection for the land and for God’s creatures), and educating our children. Each of these activities actually has great spiritual significance.

Dreher says that sacramental living leads to several things: a rejection of American consumerism; an appreciation for beauty in the home, at work, and in our places of worship; a high priority on our families (which, in Dreher’s view, often means homeschooling and at least one parent at home full-time); love for and support of our local communities; and a healthy respect for the natural world. (It’s no coincidence that Dreher became very popular after a commentary on “Crunchy Conservatism” on National Public Radio a few years ago.)

But as Dreher shows, many conservatives (such as Rush Limbaugh’s “dittoheads”) show little sense of the sacredness of these things by the way that they live. Here are some of Dreher’s critiques of mainstream conservative values:

• “We right-wingers grimace at the lust celebrated by mainstream culture, but we rarely stop to think that greed is no less deadly a sin, no less destructive of human dignity. We look down on the liberal libertine who asserts the moral primacy of sexual free choice, but somehow miss that the free market we so uncritically accept exalts personal fulfillment through individual choice as the summit of human existence.”

• “[Conservatives seem to believe] that individual fulfillment is the point of life. Conservative, perhaps, in their sexual views, they are, however, libertarian in their economic principles, and believe that the free market should be the guiding light of our lives together. Thus they believe that a merchant or a manufacturer owes no loyalty to his community, nor the community to that merchant or manufacturer. They feel no particular responsibility to be good stewards of communal life or the natural world; if something of real value has been lost because of economic decisions, hey, that’s the free market.”

• “We conservatives are big on bashing the public schools, which mostly deserve it, but please don’t ask us to think about what education is for. For many of us, it’s about no more than making sure our kids get into the right college, meet the right people, and go on to have a good (read ‘lucrative’) career.” (As someone who lives in Wisconsin and sees what Scott Walker, the Republicans, and the Democrats in our state want to do to higher education, I have to agree with Dreher’s critique here.)

• “We poke fun at the sanctimony of environmentalists, and try hard to convince ourselves that the sprawling crapulence of big-box stores, strip malls, monotonous housing developments, and other degrading manifestations of our built environment somehow represents progress. We abandon or bulldoze old buildings and human-scaled neighborhoods, then create fake environments … to recreate what we have destroyed.”

• “We have unwittingly allowed a consumerist mentality to shape the way we think about nearly all aspects of our private and public lives.”

Dreher gives an example from 9/11 that sums up typical American conservative values: “As the fires in the collapsed towers still raged, [both New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and President Bush] had this advice for us: ‘Go shopping.’”

Sadly, Americans don’t value their own communities, but things. We want personal affluence, and to be left alone. That’s why we build backward-facing “McMansions” in the suburbs. The front porch has disappeared.

This lifestyle has consequences: “Consumerism . . . sees its expansion as unambiguous progress. A culture guided by consumerist values is one that welcomes technology without question, and prizes efficiency. . . . A consumerist society encourages its members both to find and express their personal identity through the consumption of products.” As a result of these values, local communities, the environment, our families, and our quality of life are being destroyed.

But Dreher is not merely critical. On the contrary, the book is actually very positive, since Dreher lays out a wonderful vision of sacramental living. And he shows that many people are, in fact, living this way today. A sacramental life is about quality, and Dreher demonstrates what a good quality life looks like in his chapters on food, the home (in which he includes a fantastic contrast between good architecture and the McBuildings being built today), education, the environment, and religion.

By changing the ideological reference point from economics to a sense of the sacredness of this world, Dreher draws on an older conservative tradition, one that involves thinkers such as Russell Kirk, Edmund Burke, and T. S. Eliot. He also draws frequently from writers like Wendell Berry (whom he interviewed at length for this book), E. F. Schumacher, William Morris, and G. K. Chesterton.

Dreher’s conservatism is one with beauty and imagination. It has an appreciation for good art, good music, good food, and good fellowship. It places a high priority on showing compassion for people, because human beings are sacred. It also recognizes the importance of the family, and it desires to make our local communities strong once again.

To give you an idea of where Dreher is coming from, here is his Manifesto:

1. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.

2. Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.

3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.

4. Culture is more important than politics and economics.

5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship — especially of the natural world — is not fundamentally conservative.

6. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.

7. Beauty is more important than efficiency.

8. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.

9. We share Russell Kirk’s conviction that “the institution most essential to conserve is the family.”

In a few places, I think Dreher is a tad over-opinionated, as well as alarmist. But overall, I really appreciated this book, and I benefited greatly from reading it. Highly recommended.

View all my reviews

"Christian art is by no means always religious art, that is, art that which deals with religious themes. Consider God the Creator. Is God's creation totally involved with religious subjects? What about the universe? the birds? the trees? the mountains? What about the bird's song? and the sound of the wind in the trees? When God created out of nothing by his spoken word, he did not just create "religious" objects. And in the Bible, as we have seen, God commanded the artist, working within God's own creation, to fashion statues of oxen and lions and carvings of almond blossoms for the tabernacle and the temple.

"We should remember that the Bible contains the Song of Solomon, the love song between a man and a woman, and it contains David's song to Israel's national heroes. Neither subject is religious. But God's creation--the mountains, the trees, the birds and the birds' songs--are also non-religious art. Think about that. If God made the birds, they are worth painting. If God made the sky, the sky is worth painting. If God made the ocean, indeed it's worth writing poetry about. It is worth man's while to create works upon the basis of the great works God has already created.

"This whole notion is rooted in the realization is not just involved with "salvation" but with the total man in the total world. ... We must be thankful for salvation, but the Christian message is more than that. Man has a value because he is made in the image of God and thus man as man is an important subject for Christian art. Man as man--with his emotions, his feelings, his body, his life--this is an important subject matter for poetry and novels. I'm not talking here about man's lostness but about his mannishness. In God's world the individual counts. Therefore, Christian art should deal with the individual."


Francis Schaeffer, Art and the Bible

"One of the most striking secular poems in the Bible is the Song of Solomon. Many Christians in the past have felt that this poem represents the love of Christ for his church. The poem can in fact be interpreted this way. But we must never reduce it solely to the picture of this relationship. It depicts the relationship between Christ and the church because every proper relationship between a man and a woman is an illustration of the relationship between Christ and the church. ... In the Song of Solomon God takes a poem that expresses in great antiphonal strength the love of a man for a woman and a woman for a man, and places it in the Word of God. ...

"How often do Christians think of sexual matters as something second-rate. Never, never, never should we do so according to the Word of God. The whole man is made to love God; each aspect of man's nature is to be given its proper place. That includes the sexual relationship, that tremendous relationship of one man to one woman. ... A love poem can thus be beautiful. So if you are a young man or a young woman and you love a girl or you love a boy, you may indeed write beautiful love poetry. Don't be afraid. That too can be a praise to God."

--Francis Schaeffer, Art and the Bible

To a man who lives unto God nothing is secular, everything is sacred. He puts on his workday garment and it is a vestment to him. He sits down to his meal and it is a sacrament. He goes forth to his labor, and therein exercises the office of the priesthood. His breath is incense and his life a sacrifice. He sleeps on the bosom of God, and lives and moves in the divine presence.

To draw a hard and fast line and say, “This is sacred and this is secular,” is, to my mind, diametrically opposed to the teaching of Christ and the spirit of the gospel. Paul has said, “I know, and am persuaded by the Lord Jesus, that there is nothing unclean of itself” [Romans 14:14]. Peter also saw a sheet let down from heaven in which were all manner of beasts and four-footed creatures, which he was bidden to kill and eat, and when he refused because they were unclean, he was rebuked by a voice from heaven, saying, “What God hath cleansed that call not thou common” [Acts 10:15; 11:9].

The Lord hath cleansed your houses, he has cleansed your bed chambers, your tables, your shops, he has made the bells upon your horses holiness to the Lord, he has made the common pots and pans of your kitchens to be as the bowls before the altar, if you know what you are and live according to your high calling. You housemaids, you cooks, you nurses, you ploughmen, you housewives, you traders, you sailors, your labor is holy if you serve the Lord Christ in it, by living unto him as you ought to live. The sacred has absorbed the secular.

Charles Spurgeon, "All for Jesus"

Christian art is by no means always religious art. . . .

We should remember that the Bible contains the Song of Solomon, the love song between a man and a woman, and it contains David's song to Israel's national heroes. Neither subject is religious. But God's creation--the mountains, the trees, the birds, and the birds' songs--are also non-religious art. Think about that. If God made the flowers, they are worth painting and writing about. If God made the birds, they are worth painting. If God made the sky, the sky is worth painting. If God made the ocean, indeed, it's worth writing poetry about. It is worth man's while to create works upon the basis of the great works God has already created.

Francis Schaeffer, "Perspectives on Art"