1 peter on Truth and Beauty

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

Recently, when I was in London, I went to the National Gallery. It was a weekday, but it was still crowded with people wearing headsets, staring at famous paintings, listening to a narrator explain th...

Goodness is beauty in the best estate.

[Beauty] “is goodness made manifest to the senses.

Truth is the only healthy place from which to speak. Assumption is the birthplace of godless chatter.

Beauty is that which, when seen, pleases.

Our task is not to protest the world into a certain moral conformity, but to attract the world to the saving beauty of Christ.

Only the beautiful is loved . . . we cannot help loving what is beautiful.

Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul.

Beethoven…turned out pieces of breath-taking rightness. Rightness—that’s the word! When you get the feeling that whatever note succeeds the last is the only possible note that can rightly happen at th...

Glory be to God for dappled things.

Though beauty gives you a weird sense of entitlement, it's rather frightening and threatening to have others ascribe such importance to something you know you're just renting for a while.

Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and ob...

My sister and her husband have lived in Asia for close to eight years. Whenever I visit, I notice the ideal for beauty is different there from where I live in Texas. For instance, women in Asia seemin...

Trust is sweet. It is better than gold. Trust is always a gift of the heart, and therefore it just may be the most precious thing in life, next to love. Trust between two people is so valuable and pre...

Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.

Have you ever noticed that we often see ourselves, specifically our bodies, our facial features differently? In 2013 the soap company Dove decided to explore this phenomenon by hiring an FBI-trained f...

People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered. Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Be kind anyway. If you are successful, you w...

In his book, Soul Keeping, pastor John Ortberg describes his mentorship by Dallas Willard early in his ministry. The following vignette occurred while Willard was teaching a philosphy course at the Un...

Leader: Heavenly Father, You do not want anyone to suffer in darkness or separation, but rather for everyone to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth. As members of your family, may we remembe...

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the lin...

Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.

The victory of God in our time over this deathly idolatry is hidden from us, as God’s decisive victory is always hidden from us. We do not know exactly when and where the victory has been wrought. It ...

Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope...

May we be no one’s enemy, and may we be the friend of all that is eternal and abides with Christ. May we never quarrel with those nearest us; and if we do, may we be reconciled quickly. May we love,...

In his book, A Peculiar Glory , John Piper provides an illustration of the kind of faith we are called to. This is no “blind faith,” in which we are supposed to simply believe without using our minds...

To tell someone what you believe may be to answer the wrong question—better to say, instead, what the church believes, better to use the language the church has bequeathed to us to shape our experienc...

Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give their wh...

When God wants to sort out the world, as the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount make clear, he doesn’t send in the tanks. He sends in the meek, the broken, the justice hungry, the peacemakers, the ...

In any polarized situation, the overriding human tendency is to draw a line with oneself and one’s allies on the good side and the opposing party on the wicked side, with very little attempt made by e...