The Church and the Arts

Just reading "The Gospel Accroding to Peanuts" by Robert L. Short.

You may know that Charles M. Shultz (creator of Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the other Peanuts gang) was a believer (same with B.C.'s Johnny Hart). He said:

"...if you do not say anything in a cartoon, you might as well not draw it at all. Humor which does not say anything is worthless humor. So I contend that a cartoonist must be given a cahnce to do his own preaching."

The book has a section on the church and the arts. It begins:

"'How shall we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?' (Ps.137:4) is a question the Church, always finding itself in but not of the world, urgently needs to consider today..."

The discussion centers on communication to culture through culture. Short continues:

"Art has a way of getting around man's intellectual and emotional predjudices. This is because art always speaks indirectly--wheather in being the vehical for delivering a new answer, or in causing a new kind of question to be asked..."

He contends that art is a reflection into which we peer seeing ourselves. As such art is a great communicator of truth and the human condition; opening windows into the soul and exposing want and need--especially the need for Christ.

The aurgument is somewhat scholarly and lofty for ideolgies expressed through cartoon illustrations. erhaps Shultz was deeper than we have imagined, but, through his art, we "got it." Case in point. The section, if not the whole book is worth a skim.