WHO WOULD BE OF THEIR AGE? (via ef brown):

Palestrina Was Not in Vogue: The counterculture struck at God himself. How much damage was done? (GEORGE SIM JOHNSTON, November 13, 2003< Wall Street Journal)

A few years ago, while visiting college campuses with my son, I witnessed an odd but recurring phenomenon: Our student guide would be showing us around a beautiful New England campus--all arches and spires and ivy--when we would abruptly stop in front of a building of incredible ugliness. Either a science center or a library, it looked like the Death Star about to become fully operational. Or an auto parts warehouse that had escaped from some malevolent industrial park.

"Oh, this," the guide would say with a cringing gesture. "It was built in the early '70s. We try not to notice."

Such moments of cultural dissonance come to mind while reading Mark Oppenheimer's Knocking on Heaven's Door, a study of the effect of the 1960s and early 1970s on our relationship with God. According to Mr. Oppenheimer, most Americans did not respond to that era's cultural upheavals by joining ashrams or doing TM. Rather, they brought the revolution into their churches and synagogues. And the results were striking: radical lesbian Episcopalian priests, Catholic Masses that sounded like Peter, Paul and Mary concerts, and Unitarians channeling whatever the Zeitgeist had to offer. [...]

At least in the Catholic Church, an increasing number of worshipers began to treat their faith primarily as an exercise in self-esteem, even while doctrinal teachings remained in place, and the church experienced an invasion of the "therapeutic." The model of the human person, as presented by certain theologians and even some catechisms, was of a little god in a universe of "options"--self-affirmed, plotting his comforts, quick to "follow his conscience" when he wanted something he maybe shouldn't. By the late 1960s many Jews and Christians had managed to domesticate God into an affirmer of personal preferences.

None of this registers with Mr. Oppenheimer, who is mostly content to report the surface manifestations of the Me Decade without touching on the deeper issues, such as the validity of supernatural faith and the proper role of religion in public life, and without asking whether a secular culture benefits in the long run from denominations that simply do its bidding.

Which only goes to show the wisdom of Merton and Chesterton--Lord, save us from those who follow their consciences.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 13, 2003 1:20 PM