10/11/2025. The Aesthetics of Shalom: An Introduction

Michael Klein, a musicologist at Temple University writes about Witold Lutosławski’s string quartet, a piece riveting in its physicality: “What we need to do to get along in our daily lives is to remember to forget the ‘radical discontinuity’ between organic life and the symbolic order that imposes a structure on it. But sometimes you forget to forget. You confront a small compulsive gesture or tic, a slip of the tongue…which condenses all you had to forget so that you can swim in your everyday certainty.”

Ursula K. Le Guin speaks in starker terms: “We human beings have made a world reduced to ourselves and our artifacts, but we weren’t made for it, and we have to teach our children to live in it. Physically and mentally equipped to be at home in a richly various and unpredictable environment, competing and coexisting with creatures of all kinds, our children must learn poverty and exile: to live on concrete among endless human beings, seeing a beast now and then through bars.” –

In other words, there’s a structure we construct and then superimpose on the world to help us make sense of it, to navigate its wildness and chaos. But there are moments where something disrupts our notions of order. The whirl and swirl of wild creation rattles our shutters and makes our houses creak. It jolts us out of the comfortable predictability of our routines and tasks and habits, and reminds us of the wildness ‘out there’. And also the wildness ‘in here’.

If this is true, what of it? What does Klein’s “radical discontinuity between organic life and symbolic order”, or Le Guin’s “beast we see now and then through bars” have to do with our every day? Why would it matter?

I want to suggest that the accommodations we create to manage this discontinuity have a profound shaping affect on how we navigate the untamable wild of organic life created by an untamable God. They direct the way that see ourselves and one another, how we live and live together.

What does any of this have to do with aesthetics or shalom? To begin, some definitions:

These accommodations (the aforementioned “structure we construct and then superimpose on the world to help us make sense of it”) are supported by an aesthetic and imaginative apparatus, which means that they function at the level of perception. They become a way of seeing.

Greg Thompson, Co-Founder and Creative Director of Voices Underground, describes the power of public memory, civic narrative, and inherited moral imagination in forming our concept of who we are, structuring and legitimizing our institutions, and setting the center and the boundaries of our communities. They direct the stories we remember and the stories we refuse to forget. It hardly needs pointing out that memory, narrative, and imagination are all fundamentally aesthetic concerns. All of this underscores the point that without attention to aesthetics, change in our social systems is impossible.

Games, Technologies, the Built Environment

Three short examples of the discontinuity between organic life and symbolic order that Klein describes:

1. Games:

C. Thi Nguyen, a philosopher specializing in game theory, describes what, at their most fundamental level, games do. “Games tell you what to want.” A well-designed game does two things:

1) It creates desire.

2) It establishes the terms by which that desire can be satisfied.

As long as you’re playing the game, you’re only desire is the acquisition of wheat, or sheep, or ore. Or to sink battleships, or to capture the queen. When you’re done playing that game, when you’ve put it back in the box and up on the shelf, you’re not thinking about ore, sheet, wheat, battleships, or queens. But while the game is going on, you can think of nothing else.

2. Tools and Technologies

Marshall McLuhan, Ivan Illich, and Michael Sacasus talk about tools and technology in similar ways. Our technologies are not neutral. Our tools always suggest something about their own use. McLuhan, in a conversation with Studs Terkel, says: “The price we pay for our own technology is obedience to our own technology… We are the servile mechanisms. You see, if you make a canoe, the paddler of the canoe becomes not the master but the servile mechanism of the canoe. And, so, if you, in the same way you make a business, the man who runs the business is the servile mechanism of the business. Every technology exacts that price of conformity from the user.”

We shape our tools and then our tools shape us. Whether the technology is a table, an alarm clock, a hammer, social media, or artificial intelligence, it invites or discourages different ways of being human. Michael Sacasas’ list of 41 Questions to Ask of Our Technologies is recommended reading. A sampling:

• What will the use of this technology encourage me to notice?
• What will the use of this technology encourage me to ignore?
• What was required of other human beings so that I might be able to use this technology?
• What was required of other creatures so that I might be able to use this technology?
• What was required of the earth so that I might be able to use this technology?
• Does the use of this technology bring me joy?
• Does the use of this technology arouse anxiety?
• How does this technology empower me? At whose expense?
• What feelings does the use of this technology generate in me toward others?

Unconsidered, our technologies don’t just affect our relationship to one another and the earth, it even affects our relationship to our bodies. Marshall McLuhan describes technologies as extensions of the self, which can also be theorized as an amputation. When we extend our vision with the telescope there’s a sense in which the telescope is the thing we see through and not the eye itself.

It’s the denial of the way in which our bodies our naturally suited to the world we exist within, and the reach for alternate.

“Not a year passes […] that I do not detect an unperceived propensity to deny the reality of living in service to the techno-Molech. Existence in a society that has become a system finds the senses useless precisely because of the very instruments designed for their extension. One is prevented from touching and embracing reality. Further one is programmed for interactive communication. One’s whole being is sucked into the system. It is this radical subversion of sensation that humiliates and then replaces perception.” – Ivan Illich

3. The Built Environment

Consider the built environment, whether a home, a building, a city, a constitution, an economic system, directs our movement through space. It handles the world.

There are a lot of ways to organize and carve up space, and any one floor plan will direct your movement through that space differently. Consider the blueprint of a house. A breezeway here means that I move to the left and not the right. A stairway there means my movement up or down in space happens in this room instead of that room. I see the brook from the north-facing window in the living room, but to see the sun rise or set I need to go to a different room with a window that faces east or west, or leave the house altogether.

These decisions about framing direct movement and they suggest certain activities over others, ways of being and ways of being together. It is the creation of path-dependency. What we build is not neutral.

Each of these examples speak to the ways that forms are formative. We are made by what we make, shaped by what we shape, written by what we write. We’re forced to reckon with the ways in which our desires and our wants are changeable.

In Matthew 6:21, Jesus says, “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” which suggests that the way we use money, resources, and power reveals what we actually value. But I think it says something more startling: our affections and priorities conform to decisions we make about where to direct our resources, our time, and our attention. The malleability of the human heart is a Scriptural axiom; it bends and orients itself in the same direction as our investments of supply, skill, concentration, and time. The heart fills whatever space is provided for it by the choices that become our habits. This is as true of communities and societies as it is of individuals, and it is the backdrop against which calls for change must be heard and understood.

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Aesthetics

Back to The Aesthetics of Shalom. Again, I’m using the term ‘aesthetics’ to describe the perceptual frameworks or systems by which we see and interpret the world, and the principal engine in the construction of our moral imagination. Aesthetics represent the world to us—or to put a finer point on it—re-present the world to us. They can either reveal or obscure reality. It’s not difficult to read the two temptations—the Temptation in the Garden and in the Temptation in the Desert—as essentially aesthetic performances, an alternate re-presentation of the world and of God’s heart towards his creation.

Aesthetics, in addition to being a perceptual framework, are embedded with an interpretive rubric: they answer fundamental questions about value. What is valuable? Who is valuable? Accordingly, where do we direct our resources, time, and attention; what do we protect and nurture, what do we disdain or ignore; what do we describe as a pollutant, or a violation.

Aesthetics also have the power to suggest a different relationship with the future. Certain possibilities open for me, for us, while other possibilities are closed off and taped shut.

So, there are aesthetic systems pointed towards shalom and its priorities, and other aesthetic systems that are are pointed away from it. Understanding which is which, and how we might live our lives anchored to a perception of the actual world God has made, is what this project is about. In other words, we’re aiming at revelation. A revelation that breaks the spell of the enchantments of non-shalom oriented ways of living in the world, replaced by an embrace of the enchantments of God’s world, of shalom. First, de-mesmerization, then re-mesmerization.

The Plan

The purpose of our project is threefold. First, we seek to develop a clear understanding of the aesthetic systems shaping us as 21st-century Americans: power, efficiency, progress, certainty, legacy, and marketplace. Second, we seek to pursue aesthetic models that support an alternative vision of life and the world—one engendering peacemaking and the flourishing of the earth and of neighbor. Third, we seek to think with our hands: it is critical to undertake this examination through making. Theology and theory are important, but they are proven in practice.

How to identify aesthetic systems pointed away from Shalom

In The Christian Imagination, Willie James Jennings offers five characteristics of an inherited malformed moral imagination that also serve as a helpful criterion for the identification of identifying aesthetic systems that move in the opposite direction of shalom:

• sanctimonious [in rhetoric]
• displacive [in fruit]
• extractive [in goal]
• dominative [in method]
• hierarchical [in vision]

Greg Thompson, in his article ‘Dreamer of Dreams’ offers: “Our inherited imagination is serene in the conviction that both its account of the world and its various actions within it are expressions of divine will. Following a harrowing inner logic, then, this moral imagination, having reified a hierarchy, proceeds on its basis to dominate others, displace them from their lives, and extract whatever it deems of value from the world, and to do so all in the name of the Triune God.”

How to identify (or create) aesthetic systems pointed at Shalom

Thompson offers the following as a rebuttal to inherited malformed moral imagination: the convivial imagination:

• instead of sanctimony, the sacred
• instead of extraction, generosity [and solidarity]
• instead of displacement, embrace
• instead of domination, service
• instead of hierarchy, equality

To conclude

The goal of this project is to present a vision for life that places art as vital to formation and discipleship, and aesthetic literacy as critical for the discernment of the Holy Spirit’s leading and the cultivation of courage; to explore how the arts can widen the aperture of our understanding and help us live into shalom with greater integrity; and that the mystery of God and neighbor might stand in clearer relief, and the staggering glory and responsibility of being made in the image of God might come into greater focus.