Author: Laura Smit

Beauty for Truth’s Sake (Book Review)

“Music, architecture, astronomy, and physics — the physical arts and their applications — demonstrate the fundamental intuition behind the Liberal Arts tradition of education, which is that the world is an ordered whole, a ‘cosmos,’ whose beauty becomes more apparent the more carefully and deeply we study it. By preparing ourselves in this way to […]

Imaginative Theology

[I]t must not be supposed that I am in any sense putting forward the imagination as the organ of truth. We are not talking of truth, but of meaning: meaning which is the antecedent condition both of truth and falsehood, whose antithesis is not error but nonsense. I am a rationalist. For me, reason is […]

Beholding the Beauty of the Lord

One thing I asked of the Lord,that will I seek after:to live in the house of the Lordall the days of my life,to behold the beauty of the Lordand to inquire in His temple. “Come,” my heart says, “seek His face!”Your face, Lord, do I seek.           Psalm 27:4, 8 The Biblical […]

Beauty as Divine Yearning

My colleague Harry Plantinga, director of the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, recently posted a blog meditating on the Syrian mystic Dionysius’s ideas of yearning for God. Harry connects the experience of yearning with the attractiveness of God’s beauty. He says:  Paul’s description of the spiritual life is not the slightest bit dispassionate in the modern […]

Reading for Beauty

Sarah Clarkson has a recent blog post with a title that makes a big claim: “We Read for Beauty.” Naturally, I decided I needed to read this one. Here’s what she understands by that claim: What do I mean by beauty? I mean a bone-deep knowledge of the goodness of the world; the heaven-crammed splendor […]

Beauty Ever Ancient, Ever New

I’ve been reading Thomas Williams’ new translation of Augustine’s Confessions (Hackett 2019), and yesterday I came to my favorite passage. It’s a very famous section, which Williams lays out as a poem. Late have I loved you, beauty so ancient and so new!Late have I loved you!And behold, you were within, but I was outside […]

The Beauty of Education

One of my colleagues at Calvin University, Prof. David Smith, recently sent me a link to a wonderful article he wrote several years ago on how school can be beautiful and education can be beautiful. The article focuses on the thought of Comenius, for whom beauty was an important value. David begins the article with […]

My Favorite Fairy Tale

 Some 30-plus years ago, I preached a sermon on Colossians 1:13-14: “He [the Father] has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the Kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” In thinking about what it meant to be rescued and transferred from one Kingdom […]