N.T. Wright Quote of the Day

"So much in Western churches in the last 200 years has just assumed that beauty is the pretty bit around the border that isn't actually the central heart of everything and you can just sort of dispense with it if you need to. I mean, you can see it in the education system. In my world, you have schools where the music is all taught by peripatetic teachers who go from school to school to school because no one school wants to spend a whole salary on them. And then when times are hard and the money is tight, well, we don't actually need that stuff, and we can axe the music, we can stop having a choir, and we don't need someone teaching art, because it's all rather flaky and we can't evaluate it and it's not going to be useful anyway ... and in fact, what we're doing is colluding with this flatlanded world where the glory has been squeezed out. So, I really want to say, bring art, music, etc. back into the middle. Not that artists are somehow more divinely inspired than anyone else, but we need that because God made a wonderful, beautiful world and he made us to be co-creators within it." -- NT Wright, Feb. 28, 2009.