Featured

My Mother’s Hidden Radiance
For years, her mental illness kept me from seeing her beauty.
Brandon Vaidyanathan
Personal History
Children of Terabithia
What is there of beauty in losing an unborn baby?
Caitrin Keiper
Essay
Six Ways to Resist the Machine
The technological mindset is corrupting our souls. It’s time to fight.
Paul Kingsnorth
Essay
How Does Beauty Shape the Christian Imagination?
A theologian tells the story of beauty, from Absalom’s hair to English country gardens.
Ben Quash
Essay
Can a Painting Save You?
My mother came to Jesus through a work of art.
Sean Rubin
Essay
Luna of Tasajera
On a windswept island far from the gangs and prisons, I saw the future of El Salvador.
Philip Holsinger
Portfolio

Insights

A Tree by Any Other Name
Befriending your backyard sycamore can change your relationship with the natural world.
Katelyn Beaty
Essay
The Riddle of Beauty in Nature
Why the poets tell us lovely falsehoods about nature.
CS Lewis
Gregory of Nyssa
Reading
The Art of the Beautiful
We are called not only to contemplate the beauty of the world, but also to express it.
Sergei Bulgakov
Iris Murdoch
Reading
The Paradox of Beauty
Can the beautiful be genuine, or is it only an illusion?
Pope Benedict XVI
Augustine of Hippo
Reading
Beckoned by Beauty
How I stumbled into a story much bigger than my own – and found my way to the Bruderhof.
Kacey Sycamore
Personal History
Icon or Idol?
Christianity has a love-hate relationship with sacred art.
Natalie Carnes
Essay
Those Hideous Stewards of Beauty
The gargoyles and grotesques on Notre-Dame Cathedral look down and see themselves in us.
Sergio Bermudez
Essay
When Life Begins with Death
In Vienna, a hospital offers palliative care to babies with debilitating diagnoses.
Veronika Kabas
Essay
One Hundred Years of Gossip
The Bruderhof’s first rule was written in 1925. After a century, does it still work?
Chris Zimmerman
Essay

Web Exclusives

Can Beauty and Justice Meet in Architecture?
An architect feels forced to choose between beauty for the rich and justice for the poor. A tuberculosis sanatorium shows him he doesn’t have to.
Kelly W. Foster
Seeing Our Way to Humanity
Through the weeds, Frederick Franck’s sculpture park Pacem in Terris still speaks.
Coretta Thomson
The Transcendental and the Sacramental
Five recent books show how Christians from different traditions are taking beauty seriously.
Benjamin P. Myers
Patina, Plaster, and Paint
A stonemason who repairs old English churches finds stories written in the stone.
Andrew Ziminski
Essay

Arts & Letters

Believing in the Last Judgment
During two papal conclaves, I sat in contemplation below Michelangelo’s masterpiece.
Christoph Cardinal Schönborn
Essay
Crafting Beauty
We asked a poet, a visual artist, and a composer to tell us what role beauty plays in their work.
Steven Toussaint
Bokani
Joanna Gill
Doers
Six New Poems by Wendell Berry
The great American writer addresses the thinning partition between this life and eternity.
Wendell Berry
Poetry