Ken Myers grew up in a conservative Christian household in Beltsville, Maryland, during the 1960s. When he was in tenth grade, two important things happened to him.
His high school music teacher introduced him to the music of Bach, taking eight months to teach Myers and the rest of the boys’ choir how to sing the motet Jesu, meine Freunde. And he fell upon a copy of the Saturday Review.
Saturday Review is pretty much forgotten today. (A number of people still remember Bach.) The magazine began in the 1920s and flourished in the postwar years. Its writers ranged widely over the arts, from music and literature to painting and drama, cultivating a readership of strivers”‹”””‹professional and college educated, if not brainy by nature”‹”””‹who were eager for self-improvement and a kind of intellectual diversion that was sophisticated and accessible. The magazine was edited by a windy polymath named Norman Cousins, a model of the kind of well-meaning and high-minded public intellectual they don’t seem to make anymore.
“Everyone else in high school was discovering recreational drugs,” Myers told me not long ago. “I was discovering Norman Cousins.”
Hmm … I like the idea of a stately liturgy, redolent with beauty, but this article misses the key question: what do the people think? The article clearly sniffs at low-brow and middle-brow aesthetics. Oh dear. Those people of bad taste, kitschy religious art, the dreaded accessible liturgies, sermons that try to keep interest unflagging … what are we to do with them? etc.
I need to renew my subscription. Marvelous wide-ranging perspective and interviews.