yet another nicolosi gem

Here's an interview with Barbara Nicolosi, who was my favorite speaker at the Transforming Culture Symposium in April. Here are some gems:

But what happened, of course, too, was a huge movement after Vatican II for everybody to become like Thomas Merton in the Abbey of Gethsemane. Rip out all the statuary and lose the colors and symbols and just have white walls. Well, that’s probably OK for Cistercian monks who live in complete silence and have no distractions, but we lay people really need the sensory helps to stay focused at Church! Somebody should have thought it through better before allowing the terrible iconoclasm of the 1970’s and ’80s to eviscerate our beautiful churches.

The other day I was in a really old beautiful church in the South, in Baton Rouge, and there was something beautiful in every corner. And when I started to get distracted from the homily, my eye over here caught this beautiful shrine to St. Joseph. And then I paid attention again, and then I got a little distracted again and I was looking at the beautiful station of the Cross right next to me. And then I was back. But it was the beautiful things that kept pulling me back into the Mass. If you have white walls, your people are just going to substitute their own images from their workaday and family worlds.

Also, the zeitgeist of the Baby Boomer heyday was egalitarianism. Anything that smacked of elitism or tradition was perceived as a negative. And the arts became a tool to make people feel a sense of belonging. So, any art that required mastery of craft was suppressed in favor of whatever was easily accessible by the masses. It was stupid thinking, actually, because nothing makes you feel a sense of belonging like experiencing the beautiful.

About raising kids:
The best spin I can put on Christians ducking down in caves of their own making today is the desire to protect their kids from negative influences. However, from a pastoral standpoint, the emphasis needs to be not on protecting our children. The emphasis needs to be on preparing our children. The fact is, your little kid is not going to become a disciple when he’s 18. He’s a disciple when he’s 6 to his kindergarten class. And he needs to be comfortable in his moment, which is a 24-hour news cycle, visual image dominated Internet world.
...
So by raising Christian kids in a “safe” cave by shutting out the culture in the hope that they’re going to be unscathed, what we actually do is we create useless, impotent disciples for this modern time. They would be great disciples for 1827. But the fact is, they cannot enter into this moment. They can’t read and enter into dialogue with the signs of their own times.

She also mentions giving hopeful screenwriters this list of 100 most influential novels, to see how many they have read. On average, they've only read 7. I have read (ahem, ahem, polishing fingernails on sleeve) 34 of these, plus sizable bits of about 10 others. I don't feel super-proud about that, though, because a lot of the ones I started just didn't capture my imagination. Like Orwell. I can't stand him. And Cooper. Ugh. I don't do well when something is required reading.

How did you do with the list? Any book club ideas?