Right you are, George. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings' is a great example of
this, as is Ray Bradbury's fiction. I would say, though, that they
presuppose a Christian world view, rather than say, a Dawkinsian world view.
For those who don't know what I am talking about, here's Dawkins:
In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people
are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't
find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has
precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design,
no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
As that unhappy poet A. E. Houseman put it:
For Nature, heartless, witless Nature Will neither know nor care.
DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.
Both LOR and Bradbury reject that world view without talking explicitly
about the cross or (George's favorite :-) the Rapture
-----Original Message-----
From: george murphy [mailto:gmurphy@raex.com]
Sent: Tuesday, July 30, 2002 3:03 PM
To: Shuan Rose
Cc: William T. Yates; asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Re: Creativity query
Shuan Rose wrote:
> Hey, we are making contributions in the field of arts. Think of
the
> wonderful, best selling Left Behind series. CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, move
over
> :-)
> More seriously, you are correct in that a distinctively Christian
> contribution to the arts seems mostly absent, except from the field of
music
> (Christian contemporary & gospel). I don't know of any major contribution
by
> Christians in the field of painting, sculpture, or the representational
arts
> in the last 100 years. There have been a number of Christian writers.But
> compared to medevial and Renaisance times, Christianity is not doing a lot
> the arts these days, and we should be doing more.
> Below is a relevant excerpt from Keith Miller's post on stewardship . HTH:
There is a pitfall here that needs to be avoided. Some Christians think
that a Christian contribution to the arts has to be a poem, composition, &c
with
an identifiably Christian theme. It doesn't.
George
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