Christian theology is so fundamental to Western civilization, and so irrepressibly dynamic, that institutional lethargy and cultural containment cannot keep it from reasserting itself—and insisting itself—within the margins of popular culture texts. There, under the radar screen, it operates counter-hegemonically and in response to the aesthetic failures of the institutional church. Unauthorized by the church, unorganized by any central idea or institution, a new Christian aesthetic can be found communicating the power and vitality of Christianity: its vision for a totalizing social transformation, its inexhaustible, unquenchable drive for the egalitarian community, and its resolute insistence on the transcendent.
VINCENT F. ROCCHIO, Christianity and the Culture Machin: Media and Theology in the Age of Late Secularism
