The Painter of Lite™

 I happened upon an old card from Square Halo books.  Upon exploring the site a bit I found this article about Thomas Kinkade and sentimentality by Gregory Wolfe.  I'm mainly quoting the end of the article but thought it was interesting. -- drs

The word sentimentality is now a term of opprobrium, but it is notoriously hard to define. Of course, that hasn’t prevented it from being the source of a few witty epigrams. The Zen scholar R. H. Blyth once noted: “We are being sentimental when we give to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it.” That’s good, but as usual Oscar Wilde hits closer to the mark: “a sentimentalist is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.”

There are times when criticizing sentimentality seems like overkill. But it would be wrong simply to dismiss the phenomenon— and the specific instance I’ve been discussing, religious kitsch—as nothing more than examples of harmless mediocrity. The great theologian, Cardinal Henri de Lubac, once wrote: “There is nothing more demanding than the taste for mediocrity. Beneath its ever moderate appearance there is nothing more intemperate; nothing surer in its instinct; nothing more pitiless in its refusals. It suffers no greatness, shows beauty no mercy.”

Perhaps, at its best, sentimentality strives for something approximating the theological virtues of hope and love. But in refusing to see the world as it is, sentimentality reduces hope to nostalgia. And in seeking to escape ambiguity and the consequences of the Fall, it denies the heart of love, which is compassion. Unless compassion means the act of suffering with the other in their otherness, it becomes meaningless. Well-intentioned as the purveyors and consumers of sentiment may be, they still want the luxury of an emotion without having to pay the price for it.