What an elder gentleman said to me in January, that he doesn’t think beauty is important in a church, won’t unstick itself. It’s lodged there like a burr in the wool or a pebble in the boot. He said he doesn’t care what the church looks like, didn’t see why anyone should spend money on making the space more beautiful. And ever since, it’s caught at me every time I try to move on. There’s something in me that won’t let it pass without answer.
It wasn’t a harsh word, not a thing said to wound. It was spoken plainly, with the weight of years behind it; quiet, steady, and, in its own way, meant to be wise. And yet it lodged in the bone.
He said it in the low season, when the light hangs grey and slow, and the ground is still hard with frost. And it throbbed. Like the way a field holds the memory of plough, or how an old coat still carries the shape of the shoulder that wore it. His words have followed me since, scratching at the inside of my ribs, asking me to respond, not with argument, but with witness. I’ve tried to swat it away, tried to carry on with the business of days, but it keeps needling back, dragging with it a flood of half-buried thoughts.
This is part of that brooding.
Call it an attempt to name what’s been lost, and maybe, in naming it, to remember how it might be found again.
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It began quietly, as these things always do. A shift here, a tear there. A loosening in the joints, a crumbling at the edges. Beauty wasn’t dragged out and executed in the streets, she was slowly exiled, made irrelevant, dismissed as outdated, elitist, unprofitable. She was told she was too heavy for an age that prized speed, too deep for an age that skimmed the surface. She didn’t suit the factories. She didn’t suit the malls. And now, we live in the ruins of her absence.
Look around you. Buildings shaped like shoeboxes. Strip malls stretching like wounds across the land. Hospitals built like data centers. Schools designed like prisons. Glass and concrete and steel thrown up in every direction, as if the only goal were to deny the eye any place to rest, any line worth following, any whisper of wonder. The cities have grown taller, but they do not lift the spirit. The homes have grown larger, but they are colder. The streets are louder, but no song remains.
This did not happen by accident.
At the start of the 20th century, beauty was still a shared expectation. A child knew a church should soar. A town square should gather the gaze. A civic building ought to speak of something larger than the one who built it. But two world wars, a Depression, and an industrial machine that demanded uniformity did their work. After the rubble was cleared, a new ideal rose: function over form. Speed over craft. Volume over soul.
Le Corbusier called houses “machines for living.” Philip Johnson scoffed at architecture’s need to “say anything.” By the mid-century, the triumph of utility was complete. Brutalism—the architectural expression of force and disregard—was held up as modern genius. Concrete bunkers became libraries. Blank glass rectangles replaced the ornamented banks and post offices. We called this progress.
But even worse than the buildings were the reasons behind them.
In 1958, Jacques Ellul warned in The Technological Society that Western culture had fallen under the spell of “la technique.” Not just the rise of machines, but the enthronement of a mindset, a way of seeing the world where the highest good was not truth, not beauty, not even virtue, but efficiency. What worked fastest, cheapest, and at the largest scale was called progress. All else—morality, aesthetics, soul—was cast aside like worn boots at the door.
Ellul saw what few others dared to name: that this shift wasn’t neutral. It reshaped the human mind. It made us believe that anything standing in the way of progress, be it an old cathedral, a cobbled street, a tradition handed down, was a problem to be solved, an obstacle to bulldoze. If a thing could be done faster, then it should be. If it could be made more efficient, then it must be. And thus the slow death of discernment began.
So we gutted our cities. We tore out the heartwood and poured highways through the ribs of old neighborhoods. Children played beneath overpasses where homes once stood. In the name of convenience, we built concrete boxes and called them homes, schools, stores, each indistinguishable from the next, each a monument to the unfeeling logic of mass production. The box became our sanctuary.
Beauty, once considered a sign of the divine, became suspect. If it could not be measured, if it did not improve output, it was declared wasteful. As Ellul said, technique has no morality. It doesn’t ask if something ought to be done, only if it can be done more quickly and more profitably than before. And so the modern world rolled forward, flattening the hills, silencing the bells, and painting over the stained glass with matte black.
By the time Neil Postman wrote Technopoly in 1992, he was already diagnosing the results. We had not just welcomed technology; we had given it sovereignty. Culture, Postman warned, was no longer guiding technology, technology was guiding culture. The machine didn’t serve man; man bent his back to feed the machine.
And in this culture, the beautiful became unbearable. Because beauty—real beauty—stirs longing. It awakens hunger for the transcendent. It reminds us that we are more than parts in a system. But a soul stirred is a soul that might ask questions, that might rise up and refuse to be counted, tracked, and monetized. So the system gave us the counterfeit: flashy but empty, sleek but shallow. Neon signs and blacked-out ceilings. Noise in place of song. Screens in place of stained glass.
The older world, the one that carved meaning into its walls and poured glory into its ceilings, is dismissed now as impractical, excessive, elitist. But what replaced it? Schools that look like prisons. Churches that look like warehouses. Homes built like cartons to be stacked and sold. Even the language has changed. We no longer ask, “Is it beautiful?” We ask, “Is it scalable? Is it user-friendly? Will it boost engagement?”
We have traded cathedrals for cubicles, frescoes for infographics. And in doing so, we have trained a generation not just to accept the ugly, but to expect it, to recoil from the beautiful as something foreign, even oppressive. A well-carved bench is now a relic. A quiet space is now a glitch. A silence that once invited prayer now feels threatening to minds shaped by noise.
Ellul’s prophecy was not about machines with gears and wires, it was about men who forget what they are for. The triumph of technique is not in what it builds, but in what it destroys without apology: wonder, dignity, holiness.
And the great tragedy is not only that we let this happen, but that we convinced ourselves it was progress.
Wendell Berry watched this happen from his farm in Kentucky. He wrote bitterly of barns replaced with metal sheds, of fields paved over, of towns hollowed out by chain stores and glowing screens. He asserted that there is no sense or sanity in a society that will destroy the very sources of its own health and life. And yet, destroy we did.
Even our food became ugly, engineered for shelf life, not taste; made in factories, not grown in soil. A tomato that could survive a 2,000-mile truck ride was worth more than one that tasted of summer and sun. Beauty in flavor gave way to the bland durability of the market.
And the churches followed.
Once, churches were built to reflect the glory of heaven. Even modest ones had care in the molding, balance in the lines, light that broke through glass like grace. But now, many resemble discount theaters or pop-up coffee shops, spaces that do not reflect eternity, but our own exhaustion. As the culture abandoned beauty, so too did the faithful. A black wall behind a Plexiglas pulpit now says: We are modern, relevant, unthreatening.
But man was not made to worship in warehouses. The soul does not rise when surrounded by drywall and flickering LED screens. The cross cannot be a stage prop.
T.S. Eliot, who watched the West’s unraveling with a poet’s eye, opined in Four Quartets, that we are not here to verify, instruct ourselves, or inform curiosity or carry report. We are here to kneel. But in a culture that has replaced kneeling with scrolling, reverence with relevance, we do not kneel. We slouch. We spectate.
Kneeling. That ancient act. It’s not efficiency. It’s not productive. It doesn’t yield data. It has no economic return. But it bends the spine toward something higher than the self. It places the head below the heart and the heart below the heavens. It’s not about submission to power—though that’s what the modern mind, addicted to autonomy, assumes—it’s about alignment with reality. With the grain of the world as it truly is.
But in an age where kneeling has been replaced by scrolling, reverence replaced by relevance, we do not kneel. We slouch. We spectate. We flick our thumbs through images of other people’s lives, looking for a flash of meaning, and finding only the thin gruel of performance. The screen has become our altar, and its liturgy is endless. There is no moment of stillness, no hush before the mystery, no veil to lift. Just motion without movement. Image without substance. Endless inquiry with no aim.
The digital man is never still enough to kneel. His soul is stretched thin across a thousand pixels. His eyes flick, but never dwell. His thoughts click, but never cling. He lives in the present tense, trapped in the tyranny of the now, because to pause long enough to ask why would mean facing the ache he’s buried under a flood of trivia and trend.
And so the sacred is lost, not by decree, but by erosion. By weariness. By irony. In Eliot’s day, the hunger for meaning still gnawed at the culture’s ribs, even as the old gods were being discarded. Now, we have taught ourselves not to hunger. We snack instead on slogans, on scandals, on screens. The voice that once whispered, “You are here to kneel,” is drowned out by the endless buzz of comment and click.
In a church built of glass and light, the sun once poured through stained windows to catch the dust mid-air and transfigure it. Now, the light comes from overhead fluorescents, humming, cold, casting no shadows, revealing no mystery. We’ve traded glory for glare.
And the irony is sharp, because even as we mock the act of kneeling as outdated or weak, we kneel every day to something. To the algorithm. To the market. To the whims of trend and peer and expert. We kneel, not in worship, but in dependence. And unlike the old ways, where kneeling led to forgiveness or wonder or fire, these new devotions lead only to more scrolling. More fatigue.
Eliot knew that the center would not hold if reverence vanished. He warned that the cost of our cleverness would be the loss of wisdom. That in chasing the novel, we would forget the eternal. And here we are. We’ve traded the cathedral for the feed. The candle for the screen. The psalm for the post. We have become, as he feared, hollow men, headpiece filled with straw.
But Eliot, even in the ruins, saw the thread that might lead us home. “The still point of the turning world,” he called it. That hush in the center, where all the noise ceases, and the eternal speaks. It’s there, still—beneath the noise, beneath the irony, beneath the slouching posture of a people who’ve forgotten how to kneel.
It waits. Quiet. Weighty. A stone that has not been moved.
Even our art has turned against us. Once, art was the great keeper of beauty, the sister of truth. But with the rise of the modern and postmodern, beauty was declared dead, at best unnecessary, at worst oppressive. In its place came shock, sarcasm, irony. The artist was no longer a craftsman offering a vision of the good or true or lovely. He became a trickster, a cynic, a brand.
Robert Bly, in The Sibling Society, addressed this shallowness: how modern people, unparented and uninitiated, drift through life unmoored, afraid of seriousness, allergic to gravity. The refusal to grow up became a kind of national posture. And with that refusal came the refusal to build anything worth inheriting.
Bly understood that without a deep fathering, whether spiritual or cultural, a people remain trapped in adolescence. And adolescents, left to their own devices, will not build cathedrals. They will build nightclubs and call them sanctuaries. They will favor TikTok over Scripture, slogans over creeds, sarcasm over prayer.
And what has this brought us? Depression rates climbing. Suicide reaching record levels. Bodies addicted, minds scattered, communities shattered. No one is flourishing in this ugliness. Even the wealthy retreat behind gates and security systems, their children as lost as anyone else’s. And still, the machine churns.
Now, we are told that beauty is subjective, that it is elitist to expect anything to be lovely or well-made or dignified. We are told that the new is always better, that the old must be torn down. But those who know the old ways, those who still keep the Hávamál close, who remember the sagas, the songs, the old stones and the fire-lit tellings, know this is madness.
The Norse poets spoke of innangard and útangard, the inside and the outside, the realm of order and the realm of chaos. Ugly belongs to the outside, to the wild place unruled by gods or men. Beautiful things were built within the fence, where meaning lived. The hall was not just a shelter, it was a story made visible, a memory held in beam and hearth.
And the Anglo-Saxon builders, who carved stories into doorframes and painted Psalms into ceilings, knew what we’ve forgotten: that beauty shapes the soul. It teaches us to revere what is good. It trains us to see order where there is chaos. Beauty is not a luxury, it is a signpost of meaning.
So, what is the prognosis?
The only path forward is a turning back, not a nostalgia for a perfect past, but a remembering of what was good, true, lasting. A recovery of roots, a hunger for craft, a return to reverence. We must teach ourselves again to build as if what we made mattered. To speak as if words were sacred. To shape our homes, churches, schools, and cities with the same care a poet gives a line, a priest gives a blessing.
There will be resistance. The machine does not give up ground easily. But machines can be outlived.
And beauty, though buried, still breathes.
We must raise children who can see it, speak it, make it. We must sing again in churches where the notes rise with the arches. We must paint with colors that outlast moods. We must write with ink that cuts through the fog. We must kneel again, not to the idols of progress, but before the living God who made a world full of beauty and called it good.
The triumph of ugly is not final. It is only a chapter.
And the next word belongs to those who remember beauty, and are not afraid to build it again.