If you look under “music” in our resource section, what you will find so far will be music about beauty, songs that you might want to add to your repertoire if you are leading worship and would like the people at your church to think about beauty a little more often. Hymns and spiritual songs have […]
Tag: Theological Aesthetics
Beauty, Form, and Euclid’s Elements Part 3
In the previous posts to this series, https://thinkingbeautifully.org/form-beauty-and-euclids-elements-part-2/ I set out to articulate a perspective on the opening of Euclid’s Elements as arising by abstraction of forms that arise from sensible perceptions of things experienced in the real world. I aimed to make the case that certain ones of his Definitions and the forms his Postulates […]
Introducing Brendan Sammon (Interview Review)
“Beauty is that which allows desire to turn into knowledge. All human beings are desiring something. Which means, of course, that love is very much bound up with the act of knowing. That goes against what we’re typically conditioned to think: if I’m supposed to know something, I can’t love it; I have to bracket […]
Form, Beauty, and Euclid’s Elements (part 2)
In the previous installment https://thinkingbeautifully.org/form-beauty-and-euclids-elements-part-1/ (upon which this part depends), I gave what I feel is the correct beginning in how to arrive at and understand basic notions in mathematics. In doing so, I attempted to re-appropriate medieval concepts of matter, form, and abstraction in order to understand what constitutes the objects and subject-matter of […]
David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Review Essay)
It takes time to absorb David Bentley Hart’s sprawling and difficult book, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdmans, 2003). Most reviews that I have read are full of qualifiers, noting that there is far more to this book than can be captured in a summary, and often admitting candidly that the […]
Ravished by Beauty, by Belden Lane (Review Essay)
Belden Lane’s Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality (Oxford 2011) is a lovely book. It is a book that uncovers beautiful dimensions to the Reformed tradition. It is accessible, winsome, personal and inviting. Lane does a particularly good job of summarizing some often overlooked and valuable aspects of the Reformed tradition. He dispels many […]
Jonathan Edwards on Beauty (Book Review)
“There is an infinite fullness of all possible good in God, a fullness of every perfection, of all excellency and beauty, and of infinite happiness. And as this fullness is capable of communication or emanation . . . so it seems a thing amiable and valuable in itself that it should be communicated or flow […]
Aquinas on Beauty (Book Review)
“Aquinas’s account of beauty respects both the objective and the subjective aspects that are involved in the aesthetic experience, since both objects (e.g. things, actions, people, etc.) and subjects (perceivers of such things) are necessary for the human experience of beauty to occur. At the end of the day, Aquinas’s account of beauty is best […]