From Educating for Life by Nicholas P. Wolterstorff
My good buddy John, a 6-point Calvinist, showed this to me. If you're not a Calvinist, read it anyway.
We Calvinists, with our tremendous moral and theological concerns, are always apt simply to overlook the aesthetic dimension of reality. By doing so, we slight an important human-fulfilling dimension of the world in whose midst we live. The world of sounds and colors and textures is not something we ought to close our senses to or from which we should long to escape. . . . We are here in this garden to enjoy it and to develop it, to realize its yet unrealized possibilities, to use it for our fulfillment and for our praise to God. It is the vocation of the musician to praise God and serve people by giving us combinations of sounds that, thought always possible, were never yet actualized. It is the calling of the painter to praise God and serve people by giving us hitherto unrealized but realizable color combinations. [We must not] fail to acknowledge the aesthetic as a genuine and important dimension of reality.
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