It is often said that what once was called Western Society is now 'post-Christian'. But that phrase is not intended to define what contemporary (Western) culture has come to be. Rather, it is an acknowledgement of the apparently insignificant influence of Christianity in contemporary culture. The above image is a photograph of a section of a wall in an abandoned church somewhere in Russia. The image is powerful in its simplicity. The upper and lower halves of the photograph convey extreme tension: the detailed drawing in dark tones, in the upper portion, suggests the faded realism of a Christian worldview; whereas, the starkness of simple graffiti spray painted on a bright, formless background, in the lower half of the picture, strongly suggests the purely subjective contextualism of postmodernism. "Punk's not dead", but Christianity is, the image seems to say.
