Introduction

Dear Reader,

Welcome to Love Among the Ruins: a blog dedicated to publishing insights from students of Theology of the Body (TOB) as they carefully consider artifacts of our culture—movies, music, commercials, books, etc. This project is intended to make the very dense and heady TOB accessible to layfolk.

I will tell you the story of how this came to be.

One year ago today, I published a post on my own blog (Through a Glass Brightly) which was titled “Good Clean Fun”: The Theology of the Body in Groundhog Day. It won many readers, mostly thanks to Kevin Knight over at New Advent and Elizabeth Scalia here at Patheos. Several months later, I learned that a professor (Nathan Schlueter) of the Theology of the Body at Hillsdale College in Michigan had assigned to his students a final project which cited my Groundhog Day post as the example they were to follow. The prompt read,

The Theology of the Body, at its deepest point, is intended to provide a fundamental framework for thinking about and interpreting all of reality. The task of your paper is to bring the insights of the Theology of the Body to bear upon some aspect of culture (contemporary culture, pop culture, or “high” culture). You may choose a work of fiction or drama, film, music, or some other form. Your interpretation, at its best, should help to illuminate your subject through the Theology of the Body, as well as the Theology of the Body through that subject.

Happily, I was invited to attend the oral presentations of these papers. I was floored by the quality of many of them, and I kept thinking, “These need to be published. Where? How?” Then the professor turned to me and said, “Wow! We need to take this show on the road!” Then I realized that I should be the one to do it, and that Patheos would be the perfect platform for spreading this good news.

Many of the most impressive papers from that class will be transformed into blog posts for the benefit of anyone who has eyes to see and ears to hear. Then I will go about courting other Theology of the Body courses across the country with the hope of inspiring the same assignment. My goal is to encourage young people living in this fallen world of ours to discern carefully the merits (or lack thereof) in the entertainment that they consume. Rather than thinking of leisure as a time to “turn off the brain,” I want them to see that each movie or music video or novel that they digest has a profound effect on their imagination and can lead them either closer to or farther from God. I hope that this generation can learn to appreciate the true, the good, and the beautiful, and to understand that it is a rightly ordered theology which makes or breaks those accolades.

One of the greatest challenges in evangelization is to get people’s attention. After teaching theology and mentoring young people for several years, I have found that an effective way of achieving this is to meet them where they are by looking right along with them and then engaging them about what it is we see. For instance, why does Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” music video have nearly four-hundred and a quarter million views on YouTube? What is so captivating? What is the good that attracts them? Come back next week for that post.

I’ll close with an explanation of the title and banner image. “Love Among the Ruins” invokes not only the poem by Robert Browning, but also the idea that despite the disorder of the post-lapsarian world, the Kingdom of God is here. Because human beings are made in the image and likeness of the Creator, what we create can reflect divine truths, either darkly or brightly. My task is to promote the excavation of those cultural artifacts that best exemplify those truths.  The image is Auguste Rodin’s sculpture, “The Cathedral,” which I learned about from the Vatican’s Humanum Project last fall. This clip is remarkably beautiful and very much on theme for the blog:

Furthermore, the hands look like ruins; and as fragments of a greater whole, they suggest something beyond themselves, much like the “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” I’ll campaign for a post on that lovely poem sometime. In fact, are you a Rilke fan who is conversant with the TOB? Want to try your hand at it? If you’d like to participate in this venture at any point on any worthy subject, you’re invited to email submissions to brightly.kathryn@gmail.com.

Thank you for joining us. Stop in on Groundhog Day for a reposting of the article that started it all.

Please share the news and be sure to check in each week!

Cheers,

Kathryn