Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look, and an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

Earlier this year, police in Australia arrested two men for vandalizing a sacred indigenous site with graffiti.

Spray-painted damage was over 30 feet wide and six feet high.

Facebook user reacted this way, quote,

they've got some nasty, nasty juju coming their way for this disrespectful vandalism.

Ancestors know who they are, end quote. Well, last month, Canterbury Cathedral received a

similar graffiti treatment. This time, however, no one was arrested since it was done by the permission of

cathedral officials. According to the visual arts advisor and curator Jacqueline Cresswell,

this graffiti, and I quote, is giving the marginalized community of Canterbury a voice within the

cathedral, putting profound questions to God. And here I thought that's what the Psalms were all about.

Canterbury is, of course, not just any other church building, even in Europe.

It's the church from which Christianity spread throughout England.

In the 500s, after the pagan Anglo-Saxon tribes had overrun the older Celtic Christian regions,

missionaries came to the barbarian kingdom of Kent

and the southeast of England to share the gospel. Their leader is known to history as Augustine of

Canterbury. He converted King Ethelbert and built Canterbury Cathedral as the first church for the

English. Millions of Christians came to faith through the missionary efforts that were first

sparked at Canterbury. It remains the mother church of a now very fractured worldwide Anglican

Communion and the Church of England. The new spray paint installation stands in stark contrast

to the ancient medieval graffiti that can still be seen barely on the walls of the crypt.

The barely readable ancient sketchings point to Christ, his crucifixion to the martyrs.

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