Sehnsucht

In my last post, I referenced C. S. Lewis's fascination with Sehnsucht--a deep, inexpressible longing for a direct encounter with the Beautiful/meaningful. If you listen to the lyrics of Jack Skellington's lament in The Nightmare Before Christmas, you will hear a hint of this deep Lewisian longing for something more and meaningful. And that's the point; arguments from experience lend themselves easily and powerfully to pop-culture. (This, of course, is where moral, imaginative, and aesthetics apologetics overlap with cultural apologetics--and cultural apologetics is a subject for a different blog post). Nevertheless, sometimes all the moral apologist needs to do is look at a culture's art, music, and stories. There will surely be differences between secular and sacred narratives--that is to be expected. But there is something not to be missed in the similarities! Truths scattered throughout pop-culture narratives have a curious way, even when set against God or Christianity, of being enfolded by theistic grand narratives and the Christian vision of reality.