The Aesthetics of Original Sin: How the Church's Liturgy Recovers the Meaning of Creation

Why do so many churches feel spiritually thin, aesthetically bland, and disconnected from the deep longings of modern people?

In this lecture, the Rev’d Dr Jamie Franklin argues that the crisis of the modern West is not merely theological or moral but rather aesthetic in nature. Drawing on Alexander Schmemann, David Bentley Hart, Iain McGilchrist, St Anselm, and the Christian tradition, he explores a striking idea: that Original Sin was, at its heart, a refusal to receive creation as a gift and offer it back to God in thanksgiving.

This talk traces how Christianity once understood the world as sacramentally charged with divine meaning and how that vision was gradually eclipsed by modern secular assumptions.

Topics include:

• Original Sin as a failure of “original blessing” • The sacramental vision of creation • The Reformation, iconoclasm, and the loss of symbolic thinking • Beauty, liturgy, and the recovery of the sacred • Why the Eucharist stands at the centre of a truly Christian vision of the world • What parish churches can teach a disenchanted culture

If you’ve ever wondered why beauty matters, why ancient liturgy continues to attract people in a secular age, or how Christianity can recover a sense of the sacred, then this conversation is for you.

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