Richard Mouw on a theology of cuteness:
In his famous essay “A Plea for Excuses,” the Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin complained that philosophers of art typically spent too much time focusing on beauty, when most people’s aesthetic interests are less grand. Austin expressed the hope that “we could forget for a while about the beautiful and get down instead to the dainty and the dumpy”! Maybe some creative theologian looking for a new topic could take a hint here and get down to talking about cuteness. Babies and kittens are cute, and they get a lot of attention from many people—the evidence is there at YouTube.
G. K. Chesterton offers a possible clue to explore in one of his chapters in Orthodoxy. He suggests that God’s way of appreciating things is less like that of an adult human and more like that of a child. Children love repetition, he observes. A favorite childish refrain is “Do it again!” A little kid can enjoy the 20th reading of a favorite story or poem as much as she enjoyed the first. God too enjoys repetition, says Chesterton. Every morning God says to the sun and to the hawk and to the whale, “Do it again!”–and God takes delight in what he sees.
December 9th, 2010 | 10:08 am
[...] Mouw offers some reflections on a theology of cuteness. HT In his famous essay “A Plea for Excuses,” the Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin complained that [...]
December 9th, 2010 | 11:27 pm
St.`Therese of Lisieux reveled in cuteness, and Thomas Merton at first despised her for it. He later came to see her strength, and he forgave her for what he saw as her sins of aesthetic judgment. Maybe in reality she had a Chestertonian delight in ordinary things.
December 10th, 2010 | 11:55 am
“There I was, minding my own business, trying to determine whether my quill would last me through this column, or whether I’d have to kill another goose, when I heard the most damnable commotion. Through my window, I saw that my neighbors were watching moving pictures on some sort of box. The pictures, it seemed, involved some men from the race of Ham scrapping over a ball. The spectacle delighted my neighbors who were cheering like the Normans at Hastings…”
Yes, by all means DO find some theological value in pop culture, or else your columns are going to start sounding like that. It won’t be pretty.
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