Beauty

FROM VOL.58 Ted Prescott describes the turn that the role of art in the West took in the 19th century in response to the weight of the “canons” and philosophy of beauty developed during the 17th and 18th centuries. (23 minutes)

FROM VOL. 141 James Matthew Wilson talks about how cultivating the desire to perceive the interior life of things sustains the basic human capacity for recognizing truth, pursuing wisdom, and contemplating beauty. (23 minutes)

Jason Baxter explains how Dante includes a panoply of characters and creatures in his Comedia, offering a prismatic view of all of Creation in its glory. (20 minutes)

FROM VOL. 145 Jason Baxter discusses the great psychological subtlety in Dante’s Divine Comedy. (20 minutes)

Christopher and Christine Perrin discuss the implications of architect Christopher Alexander’s (1936–2022) discovery of patterns of building that cohere with the the created cosmos and with ourselves as human creatures. (59 minutes)

Christina Bieber Lake explains how poetry is an invitation to experience the beauty and goodness of Creation as gift. (44 minutes)

FROM VOL. 151 Junius Johnson warns that the pursuit of beauty is both perilous and an experience that points to the desire for God. (25 minutes)

D. C. Schindler explores how building is a quintessential human activity and an expression of our view of the meaning of reality. (47 minutes)

FEATURED GUESTS: Jeffrey Bilbro, Daniel McInerny, Joseph Minich, Carl Elliott, Nadya Williams, and Don W. King

FROM VOL. 147 Philosopher D. C. Schindler examines how postmodernism poses a unique threat to our sense of an interior self. (28 minutes)

Andrew Willard Jones explains the two paths that exist with the development of new technologies: one which leads to an expansion of the humane world and one which exploits and truncates both Creation and humanity. (65 minutes)

In this 2016 lecture, artist Makoto Fujimura asks what would it look like for Christians to be stewards of beauty and human flourishing in all areas of life and culture. (48 minutes)

In this lecture, Gregory Wilbur explains how liturgy and liturgical time align us to the rhythms and order of Creation, forming us as disciples. (45 minutes)

In a lecture at a CiRCE Institute conference, Ken Myers presented a rebuttal to the notion that encouraging the aesthetic appreciation of “higher things” is elitist and undemocratic. (58 minutes)

Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)

FROM VOL. 67 David Bentley Hart describes how the Christian understanding of Creation as beauty and gift, as the outward expression of the delight the Trinity has in itself, reveals a vision of reality different from the pagan or fatalist vision of reality. (12 minutes)

David Bentley Hart on why Johann Sebastian Bach is the greatest of Christian theologians

In a 2010 lecture, George Marsden examines a few ways in which the distorting effects of Enlightenment rationalism were resisted in the work of Jonathan Edwards. (64 minutes)

In the second of two lectures given by D. C. Schindler, he explores the nature of authority with reference to the transcendental dance of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. (60 minutes)

In his 1993 article “J. R. R. Tolkien: Lover of the Logos,” Mark Sebanc explains how the heart of Tolkien’s creative work — in stories and essays — is energized by a recognition that the presence of what Balthasar calls the “Christ form” is the source of all meaning and beauty. (60 minutes)