One of the clear and sensible assessments reported in the book review of Theodore Ziolkowski's Modes of Belief: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief that I read in the latest issue of Commonweal (as I reported doing on my journey to Montreal) was from a comparison the reviewer made to Charles Taylor's recent masterpiece A Secular Age. (The reviewer was Richard A. Rosengarten, Dean and Associate Professor of Religion and Literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School.) There he noted that:

... Taylor argues that, in modernity, how we think about art shifts from imitation or inheritance to creation, from a shared set of common reference points to the expression of an individual sensibility. Poetics, therefore, reflects not public meaning but private expression. Art in turn becomes a separate form of expression rather than an integral function of religion or politics. While Ziolkowski would recognize the shift Taylor describes from art as imitation to art as creation, Modes of Faith underscores in impressive detail the role of individual sensibility in contemporary art. Ziolkowski shows how that sensibility remains not separate from religion but deeply engaged with it. For Ziolkowski, the modern negotiation of various claims to meaning has complicated religiosity – but it also seems to have deepened it.

These observations have been bouncing around in my head. I had long noticed, and been frustrated by, art's turn to the individual that Taylor mentioned, which more and more seems to me to have bogged art down with biography or individual perspective in ways that leave art less communal, and more in danger of slipping into self-absorption. Ziolkowski's observation makes for a useful balance lest I get pessimistic on the point, although a number of his case studies seem to suffer from all the flaws of modernity's tendency of "do-it-yourself" spirituality where people waste an awful lot of time "re-inventing the wheel" because of loss of any real understanding of the Jewish and Christian spiritual legacy. It is in the context of thinking about all this that I notice a few articles regarding the Vatican and the arts. The articles are newspaper-y, and therefore really basic, but they do point in a limited way to the intentional engagement between faith and art that's going on even at the top of the Church's hierarchy.

Reconcilable differences: The church reaches out to modern arts
Vatican says 262 artists accept invitation for meeting with pope

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