Last night while reading a new book, I had one of those moments where I just had to stop and bask in what the author just said, reading it again and again, mouth and eyes agape.

We're incapable of recognizing as morally edifying anything that doesn't advertise itself as such. the most glaring example of this confusion is found in the million-dollar industry of marketing under the title of "Christian." Given our current cultural climate, the media consumer does well to be wary of any product that has featured, foremost among its selling points, it's so-called Christainness. Buyers with a taste for propaganda (and who soon find themselves strangely disinterested in anything that isn't) will find, in that which most loudly advertises itself as Christian, much in the way of crude moralism and plenty in the way of slogans and cliches that encourage blissful disregard of the...world around them. Often promoting an unincarnate faith, this phenomenon has more incommon with the aforementioned Gnosticism than what can be understood as orthodox belief. I'm personally convinced that such market-driven theology will be viewed, historically, with at least as much embarrassment as, say, the medieval sale of indulgences.

And again,

I'm grateful for and in dire need of whatever art can keep me awake and alive to the mystery, whatever keeps me paying attention, whatever reminds me that none of us (and no ideology) are possessors of the final say. Art that doesn't bear witness to the opaque, the mysterious, or even allow any ambiguity is propaganda at best and, at worst, a ministry of death, an exercise in sentimentalizing, self-congratulatory delusion.

The author is David Dark, the book is Everyday Apocalypse, The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, the Simpsons, and other Pop Culture Icons. I don't know if any interpretation I have will add to what the author wrote, except for the praise of, "I wish I had written that." Does this need more explaining?