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Unlike issues of theology and morality, Christians find issues of aesthetic taste to be inconsequential. Taste is not exactly irrelevant to Christians as several congregations have addressed arguments regarding worship style, music, and the use of both contemporary and traditional forms of media. Also, outside the church, Christians have had discriminating opinions about the styles of entertainment and art today. However, a big deal is not made out of such issues because the Bible never said anything about such issues, and those who do care are perceived to be aesthetes and elitists. Christians who love art would assert that aesthetics is not the core of religion and spirituality, and this chapter takes on artistic taste in the concept of theology and religion.

This chapter notes that it is not impossible that Christians would go to church merely for the music instead of focusing on the doctrines contained in the hymns. John Donne, Anglican preacher and poet, however, wanted to become a part of the music himself as he believed that he would be serving God by being his instrument in praise and in worship. In doing this, he realized that he needed first to tune his most fundamental instrument in praising God—his soul. He believed that being musical did not rely merely on God's gifts but because God deserved to be praised. Donne expressed something that probably all Christians should practice, not necessarily through music but more on focusing on glorifying God. This chapter shows that aesthetic taste can in fact be molded in a way that it could be appreciative and critical, even from a religious viewpoint.

This chapter describes how romantic gastronomers—the self-proclaimed professors of taste—considered the profoundly physical pleasures of the palate to be the pinnacle of aesthetic appreciation. Various “committees of taste” established in early nineteenth-century Britain elevated food to the status of the fine arts, adopting the same juridical language and concern with philosophical principles that defined the eighteenth-century discourse of aesthetics. Food had never been far from the concept of mental discrimination, and from the earliest instantiations of British empiricist aesthetics at the outset of the eighteenth century, its vocabulary was invoked in relation to the concept of taste. When mapped against its philosophical and physiological background in the long eighteenth century, the literary history of taste described by the chapters of this book reveals the complex relations between aesthetic taste and the more substantial phenomena of appetite.

This chapter explores the conceptual background against which Wordsworth’s engagement with monastic history developed. It does so by identifying The White Doe of Rylstone as central to Wordsworth’s scheme to regenerate the moral wellbeing and aesthetic taste of the reading public, an ambition that particularly concerned him between 1807 and 1815. The chapter analyses Wordsworth’s attempt to purify the romance revival with reference to The WhiteDoe’s intertextuality with Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. In addition, an examination of the poems and epigraphs printed with the first edition of The White Doe, and of the ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ (1815), illuminates what Wordsworth meant when, in 1807, he said that ‘to be incapable of a feeling of Poetry … is to be without love of human nature and reverence for God’. The chapter proposes that this statement underpins stylistic developments that occurred in Wordsworth’s poetry after 1807.

People usually assume that cosmetic surgery is a privilege of the elite and the rich. However, women who opt for cosmetic surgery come from diverse groups in China. Using ethnographic cases, this chapter highlights the diverse motivations that lead to cosmetic surgery. It reveals that for some Chinese women, cosmetic surgery is less about vanity than practicality. The drastic and dramatic economic, socio-cultural and political changes in China have produced immense anxiety that is experienced by women both mentally and physically.