The question for artists is: Are you prepared to get to know the "bass lines" of artistic tradition, and, more fundamentally, the bass lines that God uses to hold his church in the faith? As T. S. Eliot so pointedly asked, How can we be original until we've lived inside a great tradition? How can we even begin to improvise in a way that beguiles our culture until we have something profound to improvise with?

—Jeremy Begbie, "The Future," in David Taylor ed., For the Beauty of the Church