Oh Dear! Hmm, may not be making sense. I just reread the last sentence of previous paragraph and laughed aloud at how convoluted I sound. Haven’t eaten all day and my blood sugar = low. Perhaps later. Overall, Catholicism does well. But the Catholic populace strikes me as more willing to approach the interface between culture and religion cafeteria style than do Mormons. Perhaps that’s because they *have* such a long history and their faith has weathered (and, um, authored) so much cultural change–not to mention Vatican II. We’re still such neophytes.

Ok, eating now….

Probably not, but the (often folk art) entries into the church art contest do give one hope. Ethnocentrism works poorly in an international church.

Sorensen fits uneasily into categories of Mormon art. Like Maureen Whipple and Fawn Brodie and Levi Peterson and many others, she was an insider-outsider: culturally affiliated with but philosophically and emotionally alienated from Mormonism. It’s her insider/outsider status that makes her work “high art”—that is THE classic posture of literary fiction as it has developed in the 20th century—and it’s also precisely what makes her, deep down, not so very Mormon. This is NOT to argue that she should be excluded from a Mormon canon or that her work shouldn’t be understood from a Mormon framework—just to concede that the fit will not be perfect.

Richard, your (mild and constructive) criticism is well taken. I suspect that Givens would respond by saying that yes, precisely, the constructs of high culture are insufficient to account for the ethnic and folk art that comes from the international church, and this is a major reason why he has largely excluded them from his analysis. As I argue in my review, I think think the book would benefit from foregrounding the assumptions behind his use of the word “culture”. But I wonder if the international church is really yet to the point where the periphery is changing the cultural complexion of the core, to borrow a postcolonial vocabulary. From my position, tucked into a midwest ward full of Utah transplants, I’d have to say “no,” and for this reasons I wasn’t too troubled by the omission of contemporary international art.

I don’t think that this is a lapse that decisively undermines Terryl’s analysis, and I realize that one can always make the complaint that the book should have been longer. I think that it is a really great book; I just that on certain points I think that the cultural landscape is somewhat different than how Givens describes it.