One of Chesterton's more well-known aphorisms holds that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. It is in that spirit that I generally approach a book review. I really don't enjoy doing them, because I feel obliged to do it in such a way as to give the prospective a reader a broad and fair picture of what I'm recommending, or not recommending. And this I often find tiresome, as I want to focus on the specific aspects of the book that engage me. I'm now asking myself why I feel obliged to follow such rules on a blog which is entirely my own domain and where the only rules are the ones I impose on myself. Nevertheless, I do feel the obligation, and the result in this case is that I've been putting off writing about this book, although there's a great deal in it I'd like to discuss. It is very much worth reading and discussing, so although this may be an inadequate review it is at least a notice and a recommendation.
Greg Wolfe, as readers of this blog probably know, is the founder and editor of Image, a name which denotes not only a well-known journal of religion and the arts, but also a wide range of programs–workshops, seminars, etc.–all exploring the place where art and faith meet (see link in sidebar). It's a deservedly successful and respected enterprise. I was expecting this book to be a more or less systematic exposition of the contemporary intersection of Christianity, the arts, and the culture at large, pointing toward the conclusion in the title. It isn't that, exactly, but is rather a collection of distinct but related essays in which Wolfe approaches those matters, with roughly half the book doing so through the work of specific artists and men of letters: six writers, three visual artists, four men of letters.
These comprise the latter part of the book, and were of varying interest to me depending partly on the artist. Of course I'm always interested in Waugh. The section on Andrew Lytle helped me to make sense of the one Lytle novel I've read. And the one on Shusaku Endo, whom I haven't read, reinforced my intention to do so. Somewhat to my surprise, since I'm not primarly interested in or knowledgeable about the visual arts, I found the essay on the painter Fred Folsom particularly interesting. The essay on Geoffrey Hill is maybe the third appeal on behalf of this poet that I've read, and I'm afraid it did no more than the other two to persuade me to investigate his work, which seems pretty obscure without a compensatory musical or imagistic appeal. And the essay on Marion Montgomery's critical trilogy, The Prophetic Poet and the Spirit of the Age, which I read but did not much understand, gave me some valuable insight into it.
These are all worth reading, as are the four essays in Part Two: Christianity, Literature, and Modernity, which are reflections on the situation of the Christian writer in the modern world. But to my mind the most interesting parts of the book are the autobiographical and personal essays which make up the Prologue and Part One: From Ideology to Humanism. Wolfe's intellectual and spiritual journey began in the subculture of political and cultural conservatism; if you're familiar with that world the fact that he graduated from Hillsdale College will tell you a great deal.
To some extent he has distanced himself from the conservative movement, in part by giving pride of place to Catholic faith over political orthodoxy, but this is not one of those stories in which the young intellectual turns his back on his roots. It is, rather, an account of a continuing argument: a recognition that diagnosing and denouncing the modern crisis is not, alone, an adequate response to it, and that to turn one's back on the culture in which we actually live is to cede it to the forces one opposes:
A corollary of the conservative alienation from modernity is the tacit assumption that Western culture is already dead. The stark truth is that despair haunts many on the Right. When conservatives turn to art and literature they generally look to the classics, safely tucked away in museums or behind marbleized covers. Ironically, many conservatives don't seem to have noticed that they no longer have anything to conserve–they have lost the thread of cultural continuity. They have forgotten that the Judeo-Christian concept of stewardship applies not only to the environment and to institutions but also to culture. To abdicate this responsibility is somewhat like a farmer refusing to till a field because it has stones and heavy clay in it.
He's pretty tough on the damage done by the "relentless negativism of the culture wars" and cautions conservatives and Christians against allowing themselves to be boxed into its categories and, worse, to be dominated by its anger and suspicion. I'm very sympathetic to this position–see this post from 2007–but it is increasingly clear that, as with any war, the wish to stand apart from it does not mean that it will leave you alone.
To say that Wolfe recommends an active engagement with modernity on the part of Christian artists and lovers of the arts, which he does, is an inadequate summary of his argument. The broad intention, yes, has been stated by others, including no less than our recent popes. But his articulation of that principle, and his defense of the arts as a place where that engagement can happen, are distinctive and, so to speak, hands-on, in that he is very much a part of the work that he recommends.
I myself grow ever more doubtful that such efforts will have much impact on a culture for which the word "decadent" no longer seems really applicable: we are seeing rather the rising toward dominance of a new culture which is animated in part by a positive hatred of the Christian past and a desire to eliminate it as a living force. But even if that's the case, the effort is not wasted. It never is.
(The book is published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute; I will send you there instead of someplace like Amazon for purchasing information.)
Light On Dark Water 
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