Speaker 1: The truth is that we have now seen the fruits
of the world they proposed to us. Right, So, one
hundred years ago it would have been harder. It was
harder to resist. Their world they wanted didn't exist yet.
And so they were saying, if you just get rid
of this superstitious nonsense and all of this hogwash, and
you just follow these things, we will reach utopia. We
will have the best world. Well, now they got it.
They've had it, they've had their chance, and it sucks
and it is not good. And so we have to remember,
and now we have to recapture our confidence, not in
ourselves obviously, our confidence in Christ, our confidence in knowing
that Christ is not just the guy that you believe
it to go to heaven. That Christ is the exemplar
of the best pattern of how to exist that has
ever been manifested in the world. And like I said,
if you're bold and if you know that that's true,
people will come. They will be attracted because it's true. Right,
because it's true. And now you know, like I said,
you can lie for a while, and lies are convincing,
and propaganda is convincing, and a lot of us are
under the way to propaganda, but that will run out.
It has to run out, and in the moment when
it runs out, you have people that are hungry. And
that's the situation we have now. This is Jonathan Pegel,
Welcome to the Symbolic World. Hello everyone, we are finally
announcing our Parodiso class. We have done two already. We
have the Inferno, we have the Purgatory, and now we
are moving to Paradise. That is right.
Speaker 2: Dante himself says Inferno that we prefer hell to paradise,
and similarly, most of us prefer to read Inferno, but
when we come to reading Parodiso, we're very confused. So
we're going to be actually taking you through that poem
line by line like we did with Inferno Purgatorio, and
actually looking at how Dante very carefully reconciles some of
the contradictory traditions about the heavens in the Christian apocalyptic
tradition and does that through the persons of the saints.
Speaker 1: And so this is truly important for us right now,
with the re enchantment of the world happening, we have
to be able to look at those that that did
it in the most powerful way that we're able to
reconcile the ancient pagan traditions with Christianity with his modern understanding,
the most modern understanding of the cosmos that he had,
and so this is the work that we need to do.
So we need to learn from Dante. So the course
starts November fifth to December third, right, is that what
I've got five weeks two to five on Wednesdays.
Speaker 2: So the cost is going to be one hundred and
ninety dollars US. But we do have an early bird
sale through the month of October, which bumps it down
to one hundred and sixty one. You can use to
code early Paradiso and that is good through the end
of October.
Speaker 1: And the Inferno and the Pregatorial class are also on
sale at the same time, so you have fifty percent
off during the month of October code Dante fifty And
you know that means you have no excuse. So if
you haven't taken the first classes, now is the chance
to scoop all that up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and if you don't want to watch live or
it doesn't work for your schedule, you'll be able to
follow along at your own pace, just like with all
of our courses. You'll have access to lecture recording, slides,
additional readings, and you can still ask questions and interact
with your fellow classmates in our circle forums.
Speaker 1: And so join us. After all of this suffering through
Inferno and Purgatorio, the symbolic world finally goes to heaven.
Speaker 2: Yeah, join us.
Speaker 1: I didn't print out my talk. It's on my laptop.
You know. Is interesting. I think Paul was saying, you know,
we're just caught. We don't even think, oh, I don't
have my notes. I just bring up my screen. So
here we are, Rod. Thank you for those very kind words.
And I didn't know much about Touchstone before the invitation,
but it has been really wonderful already to see to
kind of feel the to feel an intellectual advance of Christianity,
and to sense that we have people here that are
thinking about the great problems that we're facing. I decided
to kind of come here and give you some good news.
I think there are actually some very powerful and beautiful
things that happening around us. I do have to start by,
you know, maybe giving you a little bit of the
dark side of why we are here, and then hopefully
then I'll show you maybe help you see where the
bright seeds are planted and where it is that we
can pour some water to see the what can grow
out of this difficult time. And so I am an
artist mostly I make liturgical art. I studied fine art
in college. Now I am speaking a lot. We're also
writing children's stories doing but I am mostly an artist,
you could say. And so I get my way of
seeing through this vision of what we could call culture
making culture influence, human influence on the world. And we
know that for the past about one hundred years of
probably more than that, the world of culture has been
taken over by a vision that is a deconstructive vision.
If it's even longer than that, you could probably trace
it all the way back to the Renaissance, where the
notion of culture, or the notion of how it is
that we influence and how it is that we recognize
that which is valuable is presented as disruption rather than continuity.
And so we have this sense that novelty is the
thing that is the most important, and we have the
cycles of novelty where cultural agents will present themselves as
a disruption upon that which came before. Right, And so
if you think of the artistic movements. It's very simple,
you know, especially at the beginning of the late nineteenth century,
beginning of the twentieth century, it starts to accelerate quite
a bit, where you have the Impressionists who see themselves
as opposing and replacing the academic painters. And then you
have a succession of these revolutions where the cube look
back at the Impressionists and propose novelty on that. You
have different versions of that, and then within a very
short moment of time, it's actually very just a few years,
you basically have the template for what we most people
start to believe that culture is. Which is culture is
the act of disruption, esthetic disruption, social disruption that proposes
a type of energy that is all you know, we
have to be aware that it is a true energy.
When you see something new and when you see something
that opposes, when you see something that turns things around,
there is a kind of excitement that comes. But we
have to see that this is why we are where
we are. Accelerated cycles of these types of gestures have
led ultimately to the postmodern deconstructed world and the kind
of fragmented realacy in which we are because as those
speed up, and as they become increasingly radical and increasingly
increasingly weird, you end up with this idea that identity
itself is revolutionary, which is the transhuman position. That is,
that which makes identity valuable is the manner in which
you self identify. Right, you say, this is me, and
that's why like in the weirder stuff, like all the
stuff that's the weirdest thing. You know, this, all the
trans stuff, all the wild LGBT stuff, the furries. The
madness of that kind of world is an expression of
this basic pattern, which is the notion that identity is
to be described as difference. Right. That is, to be
something is to be different from that, to be to
be the individual, you have to show how you are
unique and you are different from others. Think of the
rock and roll aesthetic, think of the punk rock aesthetic.
Think of all of these these ideas, and then think
of a lot of the children's movies, the Disney movies
that you've seen. To be something is to be this bright,
innovative moment that is a disruption and is different from
the world in which you are. So you rebel against
your parents, you rebel against society, You rebel against some
type of moral order, and this is what culture is now. Obviously,
hopefully you can understand that, if you're a Christian, especially,
that this is not sustainable. It is not sustainable. It
is a lie. It cannot sustain itself forever. It's like
it's like a self devouring monster. Right, It's a monster
that eats its origin, and then all of these iterations
keep going. It's basically, you know, it's chronos castrating as
far right. It's a very very old story. And it
is also, as Paul said, it is Adam and Eve
in the garden, you know, reaching up and taking for
themselves in order to elevate themselves in opposition to God. Now,
everything we heard yesterday, obviously everything we heard today were beautiful,
powerful examples of how that has played itself out in
the world culturally, politically, technologically. All of this is absolutely true.
But it's a lie. It's not true. That is not
how the world works. And you can stretch the world.
You can stretch things with sin to a certain distance,
and at some point the rubber band snaps back. Right,
you can do it in your life. You can lie
in your life for a certain amount of time, but
at some point, reality comes calling, and that is also
true of culture, and it is also true of anything
that you can imagine, Like you cannot twist the world.
The world has an actual order, it has an actual shape,
and it will return. Now the question is how does
it happen? And this is where really you have to
be very attentive to notice how this thing happens. The
phrase of my brother Mattiri, who wrote a book about
biblical symbolism, he calls it the double inversion, calls it
the double flip, something like that. And the best example
to understand it is is actually a clown. Right, So
the clown mocks right, the clown opposes the clown is
Its existence is irony and subversion. But a good clown
will ultimately, in the end slip on his own banana
and fall. It's very important. That's what makes a clown
a clown. Right, So the king's clown, right, the king's
gesture will make fun of the king, but ultimately the
gesture also kind of has to make fun of himself
in that role. And that's what makes this strange thing
turned back on its feet. And so I've been had
coned this phrase. A few years ago. I said watch
the Fools. It was like around nineteen, around twenty twenty
when I started to notice that comedians and subversive figures
were starting to out of their own desire for subversion.
We're starting to embrace traditional ideas, right because it's like
the last rebellion. What do you do when you know
you have a tradition of rebellion, which is what we've
had for one hundred years. You know, the paintings that
you see now in a gallery or the if you
go to the you know, to the Chicago Art Institute
and you go visit the contemporary section, it's basically what
was being done in nineteen twenty and nothing has changed.
Rebellion is not complicated, it's really it's really you know,
we think rebellion is very sophisticated. Rebellion is not sophisticated.
Rebellion is just here's a rule, here's a pattern, and
I'm just not I'm going to do something that doesn't fit.
And that's all it is. That's what the hippies were,
That's what like, you just see what the rule is
and then you do something that's outside that you just
color outside the lines, okay, and there's actually there's room
for that, Like, it's not like that I told you
about the King's gesture, Like there are roles in society
for that type of behavior, but it cannot become the system, right.
You can't have a tradition of rebellion. You can't have
your entire cultural enterprise based on rebellion. It's just not possible.
It leads to the kind of chaos and fragmentation that
we're in. And so if you pay attention, you will
notice in this upside down world, you'll start to notice
places where normality is reinserting itself, and it's always going
to be deeply ironic at the beginning. I'm going to
give you two examples just so that you know what
it is I'm talking about. So, in twenty twenty one,
some TikToker I don't know who it was, who was
tired of being told that he was transphobic for not
being attracted to females, coined the term, you know it
super straight? Do you know that term? So he said, Oh,
I am part of LGBT culture, Like, I'm literally part
of your LGBT culture. I just happen to be super straight,
which means my sexual identity and expression is that I
am a cisgender person who's only attracted to cis gender
people of the opposite sex. Right now, if you go
now on the Glad website today, you'll see that that
is hate right. Superstraight is hate right. But it's important
to see what did you see? What happened there? Right
inside the chaos and inside the rebellion and inside the fragmentation.
Someone is able to distinguish the seed from the earth,
is able to see the difference between the pearl and
the field, is able to say, oh, this is the
shining bit, this is the sparkling bit. If I can
just point to that, it's going to change everything. Another
example online example is the trad wife. You know about
the tradwife, Well, you have to understand that the tradwife meme,
which is women online on like the social media that
are influencers really in the worst kind of way, but
but they they have They make videos of themselves, you know,
wearing like wearing very decent clothing and you know, holding
babies and they do all this stuff and you think, oh,
it's silly, it's ridiculous. It's actually in some ways what
Paul is saying, it's like you're feeding the machine. By
doing that, you're basically being subverted into the system. And
there's a way in which that is. That is true.
But the thing is that there are some patterns that
are truer than others, right, there are some patterns that actually,
if you're a Christian, you know that there are some
things that are true. And if you if you just
if you point to them, if you pull them out,
then they will have huge amounts of let's say, they
will restart the world. They will be what we could
call a tool of resurrection. Is a good way of
thinking about it, Okay. And a lot of the story
is beautiful story that we were told last night. They
talk about this. This is some of the stories in
the Bible. They actually talk about this, this image of
the fish and the gold, the gold coin in the fish.
Even this the very idea of fishing, and this idea
that because you have to understand biblical cosmology, right, so
down below in these waters is the chaos, right, it's
the thing, it's the chaos. It's this image of when
the world falls apart, what happens the flood. Right, when
everything falls apart, the flood comes back, and then you
return to this primordial chaos right, and you can feel
it right in the fragmentation. You can feel it in
the fact that people don't know their neighbors in our suburbs,
people don't know each other, that there's political factions that
look like it's impossible that they will heal themselves. But
Christ in that story says that hidden in that stuff
there are some bright, shiny bits. There are some things
that are sparkling. And if you want to know what
the future world is, you better pay attention and you'll
be able to see where those sparkling things are happening.
So yesterday we heard about the miracle of the walking
on the waters, right, and I would like to tell
you that it's happening now. A Christ is walking on
the waters right in front of us, and we should
not let him pass by. There are transformation in culture
that are happening, that are showing us that there is
a return to what we can call verticality. And this
is happening at all in all the different fields simultaneously.
Where reductionism materialism is over. It no longer yields sufficiently.
And so you have very prominent thinkers, scientists, all kinds
that are experimenting with notions of superior agency that are
experimenting with ideas of intelligences that are acting on us.
And this is happening all over right now. And this
is why you know, Rod's book is a great example.
There are several books that now are like coming out.
Rod has been wanting to publish his book. He's been
like a prophet before time. He wanted to published book,
like five years even trying to publish this book. So
finally gets it published, and then there's like a flood
of Reenschantman books that happen at the same time because
he could see it right from before that. In fact,
everybody is yearning and is looking for ways to unite,
and it's happening politically too, right. So many people, young
people are realizing that the liberal order, like the liberal
classical liberal idea, is not enough, right, that the rights
of the dadividual, that the strength of the individual isn't enough.
Because now we're seeing that we're falling apart. Why are
we together? What makes us a nation? What makes us
a family? What makes us anything except for just fragmented
individuals in the suburbs that have no town centers, that
have no commonplaces, that just exists. You know, like these
broken little bits and it's scary, right, It's very frightening
right now. It's a dangerous crazy time because everybody is
grasping what are these vertical relationships? How do we connect
to that which binds us? How do we do it socially?
How do we do it as people? And it's coming
out in all these wild ways, which is interests in fascism, yeah,
but also weird religious like UFO obsessions and also you
know the same thing within the kind of LGBT LGBT thing.
It's like trying to provide a solution to that problem.
They're saying, we want work and it doesn't work. I'm
sorry it doesn't work. They're saying, we know we need
something to unify us. If we could only make difference
unify us like, it would work. We could just keep
pushing like diversity, If we could just have diversity, then
it would work. But obviously that's ridiculous, you know, I mean,
diversity without unity is decomposition, right, That's what decomposition actually is.
And so but it's the desire. You have to be
able to recognize the desire that people have is a
legitimate desire, and the desire of these little extremists that
are appearing around us, All of those are legitimate desires.
And so we have right now one of the greatest opportunities,
which is you have a whole generation of young people
that are hungry. They are hungry for meaning, they're hungry
for connection, They're hungry for some kind of vertical relationship. Right,
and as Paul said this morning, just happens that we
have the best story, that we actually have the best story.
We have an image which is not of the machine
as this top down thing with cogs all doing their parts.
We have a body with a head that unites the
body together so that it's well fitted in love. That
is the that's the best story. So what do we
do now? Right? What can we do? And I want
to separate this into basically three ideas and remember, celebrate
and create, and those three we need those three to
be together. We need to first remember one of the
things that's happened in the past decades is that Christians
have been on the defense, constantly, constantly on the defense,
constantly trying to justify their story against attacks and against
all of this stuff. And we've kind of been beaten
down and we're kind of ashamed, and we don't quite
know how to answer. And the truth is that we
have now seen the fruit of the world they proposed
to us. Right, So, one hundred years ago it would
have been harder. It was harder to it was harder
to resist, it was harder to propose because their world
they wanted didn't exist yet. And so they were saying,
if you just get rid of this superstitious nonsense and
all of this hogwash, and you just follow these things,
we will reach utopia. We will have the best world. Well,
now they got it. They've had it. They've had their chance,
and it sucks and it is not good. And so
we have to remember. And now we have to recapture
our confidence, not in ourselves obviously, our confidence in Christ.
Our confidence in knowing that Christ is not just the
guy that you believe it to go to heaven. That
Christ is the exemplar of the best pattern of how
to exist that has ever been manifested in the world.
And like I said, if you're bold and if you
know that that's true, people will come. They will be
attracted because it's true. Right, because it's true. And now
you know, like I said, you can lie for a
while and my eyes are convincing, and propaganda is convincing,
and a lot of us are under the way to propaganda.
But that will run out. It has to run out.
And in the moment when it runs out, you have
people that are hungry. And that's the situation we have now.
In the Bible, memory is explicitly used to describe the
moment of the shift that I'm telling you about, the
moment when the world has fallen apart, has broken down
into absolute chaos. And in that dark moment, there's a switch,
little switch that goes on, and that switch is represented
as remember. Give you two examples. There are many of others.
I'll give you two of the biggest ones. What happens Noah,
The whole world falls apart, Noah's on the waters, everything
is over. What does it say after the rain stops?
Says God remembered Noah? Right. What happens when Jonah goes down, down,
down into shale, all the way to the bottom in
the belly of the fish, He says, I remember, I
remember your holy place from the depth of hades, from
the depth of shale, I remember your holy place. And
so that is what we need to be able to
do is to remember, and in remembering it will mean
that we have to pass off so much of the
nonsense that the reductionists have laid upon us as Christians.
We have to be able to recover and remember the
best versions of what Christianity is, the highest version of
what it is. And it's powerful, because yesterday I was
really happy to hear that here at Touchstone, you're able
to realize that Christianity is not just a kind of
moral situation about our relationship, you know, how we're going
to die or where we're going to go. That is
actually an ontological structure. It is a way to understand
the world, and it's a way to exist in the world,
and it is the best one. And if we can
if we can recapture that, then then we become the
arc right, we become the transformed, from the dead Noah
in the belly, to the prophet to the to the
pearl that is hidden in the seed. So what does
it practically mean to remember? I see it in three ways.
It's to first of all, change the way we think
about what culture and human existence is, to stop thinking
that it is about disruption. Because as Christians, we also
tend to think that it's just you know, we were
we grew up in this world, we lived in this world.
We tend to think that innovation is a good in itself.
We tend to think that thing are constantly have to change,
that things have to adapt to the world, right, we
have to just and that all of that is baked
into this idea that in fact it's the change which
is valuable, right, and not the source. It doesn't mean
things don't have to change. Things have to change, right,
But if you change as you remember, that's you can
change because you remember. Do you know what I mean
when I say that, Right, If you're going to the store,
and you know why you're going to the store, and
you have a plan and where you're going, and then
a road is closed off because of construction, then you
will change because you remember. You're not going to change
to adapt the goal or to adapt to like, to
change what it is you're doing. You're going to change
in order to remember. And that is very different in
terms of what the source of our And we also
have to be able to rethink of our selves as continuity.
We have to be able to think of humans as
people that come from somewhere, people that are continuous with
our ancestors, continuous with the stories, obviously identifying with the
best of it, and not move, not embrace this aesthetic
of constant disruption. So we have no excuses anymore. You
have to know your church history. Really, you have to
know the Bible, you have to know the great thinkers
of our Christian faith. You have to learn to know
what is it that Christianity has produced, The beauty that
it has made in its music, in its architecture, in
its art, all of that. In this moment when everything's
falling apart and we're pornified and we're Game of Fi,
those images, they are a moment of memory. They can
be a moment of memory for us, but also for
others too, even for people who aren't Christian. How many
people I mean, I come from an orthodox tradition, but
I know there's so many people that walk into a
traditional church and are struck down by beauty. They're struck
down by beauty. Beauty for beauty for us is now
a weapon in a world that is the ugliest that
it's ever been. People don't even know, like they don't
even know people. They go and they go on to
Europe and they'll travel thousands of miles to go see
beautiful things. All right, let's do it. Let's make beautiful things,
you know, but we also have to remember stories. You know.
One of the things we're doing now is we're telling
fairy tales, as some of you might might have seen.
And the reason is because again, these stories that have
been handed down to us that are images of continuity,
they contain in them something of who we are. Even
if you don't totally understand it, it's okay. They contain
something of what it is that thousands of people, you know,
for a thousand years, people have cared about for century
over century, what people have attended to, what people have
thought was important. And they transmit these stories through generations
in a manner that it's like almost like an automatic process.
The very fact that some of these stories are with us,
you know, that have been to us, with us for
a thousand, thousands of years, or hundreds of years, means
that they have in them a little bit of a
seed of what it is that continuity looks like, right,
because they are images of continenty fairy tales are a
good example. Fairy tales are images of continuity because there
are stories that are passed down generation to generation, and
so we have to kind of think of it that way.
Deacon Seraf and Roland, who's coming up next, he will
tell you about this, and I hopefully pay attention you
will give you some keys to how it is that
we can do that with the way we think of history,
the way we think of our place in the world.
So the next thing we need to do is celebrate culture.
For almost every civilization, every tribe, every place in the world,
culture is celebration. It is not ironic, it is not
just for innovation, and it is not entertainment. All of
these are parasites on what true culture is. True culture
is celebration and participation. And so if you put up
a public monument in your town to remember something that
is related to an important moment, an important origin, that
is true culture. You know your national anthem, that is
true culture. The songs, and obviously you can imagine where
I'm leading this to. All of this has to be
downstreamed from worship, because that is the true art, the
true art, and the true culture is worship. It's the
beginning of culture. It's the beginning of everything that how
can I say that it's the beginning of every human
activity is worship, and that's why worship looks the way
it does. That's why worship is singing. That's why worship
is us binding together, uttering the same words together, singing
the same songs together, because it is celebratory. And that
is something that we really kind of have to shift
in our mind. Now, does it mean that we won't
sometimes be entertained, No, that's fine, right, And actually even
this idea that some art or some culture is disruptive,
that is totally normal. That has been part of the
world forever. There are gargoyles on cathedrals, right, and in
medieval manuscripts there's all these little monsters on the edge,
and so disruption and questioning and like novelty and surprise,
that's not it's not that it's not part of culture.
But it's not in the middle. It's not in the center.
You don't put a gargoyl on the altar. Just keep
it in the corners where it's kind of funny if
I'm distracted, you know, And that's that is the difference.
So we the first place where the cultural transformation has
to happen is is in liturgy. It is it is
in liturgical art. I think liturgical art is the future
of art. It's the future of art in America, and
there are inklings of this some amazing artists. There are
some what I believe to be some of the greatest
artists living that are painting images for churches right now.
You can look them up. Father Siluan Justiniano. He's an
American monk, wonderful guy study contemporary art, mastered, you know,
color field painting and modern color theory. Then ultimately became
a monk broke and started to paint icons in ways
that are deeply full of memory, right, but also sophisticated
and powerful. And this is happening all over the world,
right It's happening in England. There's an artist Aidan Hart,
who is legitimately, you know, one of the greatest artists alive.
It's happening obviously in Romania. It's happening in Russia. It's
happening in many countries where the liturgical art is actually
the future. Architecture, city planning, these are the most some
of the most important things. We forget about it. We
don't think about architecture and city planning, but these are
the basis of what it is that humans recognize as
being inside and outside, what we recognize as being above
and below. These are all pre set. Are the reason
why architecture and city planning are the most important, some
of the most important arts, is because they received in
the background. People live in them, many people don't aren't
even conscious of them. And for that reason, people aren't
conscious of the anxieties that modern city planning and modern
architecture does to us. Like what the anxiety that it
that it lays on us and we don't realize that watually,
walking through, you know, a series of skyscraper glass skyscrapers
is actually an experience of dread, a little bit of
dread in that and in that experience, and we're so
used to it because we we there's awe in that dread, obviously,
but it's not it's not. It's not the type of
awe that would make you feel at home for sure. Okay.
And so there are right now movements and all of
you can look into it. There are powerful movements of
new urbanism, new city planning, new architects. There are some
little inklings, you know, little things that are happening. If
you don't if you know, I don't want to get
into politics, but uh, Trump's one of Trump's executive order
is to force all federal buildings to be designed classically. Right,
so if that works out right, it's already a little
hint what it is. It's like, it's like a glimmer.
It's showing you that something's changing. For that that reached
the top of the pyramid means that there's strength and
there's there's things moving down here. So I would say
that if you're building churches, if you're building houses, if
you're if you're decide if you have to decide where
to live, to take that into consideration that this is
something that you can do very practically, and then obviously
understands story as participation. We we have for a while
now we have this weird idea about literature. You know, well,
literature is great, but we have this idea that we
should read great books, you know, to be smart and
to kind of know what culture is. There's nothing wrong
with that, but that is definitely not the heart of culture, right.
The heart of culture are the stories that you live in,
are the stories that are part of you. So that's
why the fairy tales, Right, if you're going to read
the Iliad, if you're going to read the Odyssey, if
you're going to read some of these ancient stories, do
it understanding that these are your stories, that these are
the stories that brought us where we are. So you're
going to read the Bible, realize that this Bible is
the story that I am in. I am in that story.
This is not like something that I'm looking at from
the outside. But that's true for a lot of other things.
It's true for your own family stories. It's true for
your national story. And that's why there's a great desire
to subvert they of the national story because people know
that change the story change the world. Right, If you
change the story, you change the world. So as Christians,
we can be definitely attentive to that and change the
way we understand story. Memorize stories. If you have kids,
memorize fairy tales and tell them orally, don't just read them,
tell them orly. Do the same with Bible stories. Tell
the Bible stories to your kids orally too. Read them
from the Bible. Yes, but internalize the stories because they're
your stories. They track what it's important to you. Okay,
So the next thing I would like to encourage people
to do is to create. You know, we've also been
in a situation for one hundred years where Christian art,
Christian artists have been on the outs. Right. We have
been on the outs both in terms of social relevance,
but we have also been on the outs in terms
of quality. So we have to be fair to ourselves.
And one of the reasons why Christian art is irrelevant
is because it stinks, because it's not good. And the
reason why it's not good is because of the the
two things that I said at the outset. The reason
why it's not good is because most of the Christian
artists have embraced the nonsense of innovation. They have embraced
the idea that art is self expression. Art is not
self expression. That's ridiculous. What an artist should want to
express is something that is far beyond their self. That
is what the artist should want to express. That is
true art, and that is that is that is the
art that is transformative. So we have to we have
to change, We have to metanoia. We have to stop
thinking that way and encourage if you have children, if
you have people that you know that are creative and temperament,
put the pressure on that they remember and they celebrate.
Christians have made some of the most beautiful things in
the existence of the world. Christians have made monuments to
the glory of God. Christians have written music to the
glory of God that is beyond anything that anybody has produced.
But we don't remember because we think it's all old
fogy stuff. It's like, no, we need to be with
the times. Well, the times right now, everything's breaking apart,
So we're going to have mumble wrap in church? Is
that the next thing? Right? Like? How far do we
go with this? Right? How ridiculous do we become before
we realize that we have in our we have in
our memory, we have all we need for true restoration.
Artists have no excuse not to not to know anymore.
And as Christians, if you run institutions, if you run schools,
if you're a teacher, you have to train yourself. And
you know when you think that we don't do that,
like we have your kids look at images of that
Christians have produced. Take them to the most find the
most beautiful church in your city and take the kids there, right,
even if it's not your own denomination or whatever, just
so they can see what it is that Christians can
make that is beauty to the glory of God. And
this is one of our greatest weapons because like I said,
everybody's hungry. Everybody's hungry for it. And know and be bold,
right because this is hard for maybe some of you
to believe. But this is the future. This is the
only future. There's no other possible future except for the
one that I'm telling you about. If you are a Christian,
you have to know that this is the only way
that it can go. Anything valuable that will come downstream,
that will come down the line from this moment on
will have to be to the glory of God. And
look at what's happening. You know, it's like Paul has
to you have to plug your ears in mister King's North.
You have one of one of the greatest living writers
in the English language that came here to tell you
that he wants the world to be submitted to Christ.
And he's not the only one. There are weird and
wonderful conversion stories that are popping up. If you're paying attention,
you know Ian HURSTI Eli has converted and there are
other people in that field. Martin Shaw, who who Rod
has talked about in his book is literally one of
the greatest living storytellers. Barnard, not the not the not
the one of the best living Christian storytellers. No, no, no,
one of the best storytellers in the world. And that's
what's possible. That is really what's possible. Right, And pay attention.
Hollywood is collapsing, you notice, I hope, right, yeah, but
in that void, watch what's happening. Be attentive. There will
be voices that will appear in the chaos. That will
be voices worth attending to. And voice is worth encouraging.
So be attentive, right, and be ruthless. Don't expect nothing
less than the best, the very best. We have bach
like you know, we have shocked. That's all that's ours, right,
Come on, like create the best stuff, you know, And
so I think that we really have to. And like
I said, notice some examples, Like I'll give you one example,
not to pick on Paul too much, but there's a
book called Right published by Eugene Vodolaska. Many people probably
know that that is one of the greatest novels that
has been written in the past few decades. A Christian
man writing a novel about Christianity with all the subtlety
and all of the complexity of modern as a modern literature,
but looking back and remembering and celebrating in the book
in ways that are harsh at a heart, right dosti
fc Sky like, not not saccharine, not not just all
of this this fluffy stuff, but really going down into
the core and that like I said, we have the
best stories. Read the Psalms, right, I think Christians don't
know about suffering. You think Christians don't know about complaining
and and and yearning and desiring to see salvation. We
have all like the Bible has all the best stories,
and so notice and pay attention. And the next thing
for those that are creative too, I would say, also,
don't be afraid to pillage the Egyptians, right right, And
so it's not just about knowing what Christians have done.
It's not just about knowing what Christians have written or
have painted or have done. But if you want to
be creative, if you want to move into that circle,
look at what your enemies are doing, and pillage the
Egyptian take anything, take anything that's valuable in order to
serve God. And so I want to conclude and say,
you know, one of the things we're doing. I'll give
you an example of what in the vision that I'm
proposing to you is we started to we want to
retell the fairy tales. And it's related to a moment
right now. Like I said, Disney doesn't want the fair
tales anymore. They actually hate them, they actually despise those stories,
and so they're dropping them. Right. But those stories, right
they're they're they they're the pearls, they're the shiny things.
And so in a moment when people are dropping them,
now's the moment to pick them up, right, and to say,
let's tell those stories again in the spirit of memory
and celebration and no compromise, make them as beautiful as possible.
And so that's the that's the direction that a lot
of my creativity is going into. But I think, like
I said, in this particularly that's why my talk is
called this is the day. In this particular moment, right now,
it is it is particularly available for Christians to do
that because of the hunger, and because everybody else is
dropping the ball and all the stories are horrible. Who
even wants to watch Netflix anymore? Even it's not even
like at least, at least there were moments when there
were things that were perverse, but they were at least
well written things things of God. So far, now that
they're perverse and they're boring, how did that happen? Because
you think perversion is a pretty easy way to get
people's attention, But it's like to make perverted things boring.
That's how that's how much everything's falling apart. And so
find the pearl, you know, find the stories. Remember, remember
God especially, but remember, and so thank you. If you
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