romans on Beauty

Beauty awakens the soul to act.

Goodness is beauty in the best estate.

Beauty will save the world.

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...

It is not the eye that sees the beauty of the heaven, nor the ear that hears the sweetness of music or the glad tidings of a prosperous occurrence, but the soul, that perceives all the relishes of sen...

We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to r...

Our godlike beauty is hidden beneath curtains of shame.

J.M. Montgomery’s novel Emily of New Moon has a passage that conveys the attractive and terrifying aspects of the mystery of God: It had always seemed to Emily, ever since she could remember, th...

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.

“[Zach] had gone from seeing beauty in the midst of suffering to creating it. He had taken this thing that could have suffocated him with despair and stripped it down until all that was left was hope....

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

The mystery of perfection as an aspect of beauty is its transcendence. It points to a glory beyond itself. I knew that when I held my children, I didn’t simply cradle flesh and blood. I held a living ...

While brokenness is difficult, it’s beautiful because it makes God look good. Your natural gifts draw attention to yourself while brokenness draws attention to your Lord. With this in mind, power is d...

It was when I was happiest that I longed most. The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing to find the place where all the beauty came from.

Desire lies at the heart of who God made us to be, who we are at our core. Desire is both our greatest frailty and the mark of our highest beauty. Our desire completes us as we become One with our Lov...

I asked the earth, I asked the sea and the deeps, among the living animals, the things that creep. I asked the winds that blow, I asked the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars and to all things that...

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

Each of us, Lord, has failed to fully observe your beauty. We fall in love with our own image and are left disappointed and alone. Please be faithful to us, Jesus, even when we turn from You. We...

From 1992 to 1995 the world witnessed one of the worst civil conflicts, the Bosnian War. Three factions, each tied to a religion (Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Muslim Bosniaks), began attacking...

Oh God help me believe the truth about myself no matter how beautiful it is!

When one has once fully entered the realm of Love, the world—no matter how imperfect—becomes rich and beautiful, it consists solely of opportunities for Love.

If you see a thing whole—it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But up close a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life is a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You ne...

Glory be to God for dappled things.

"God's joy," said by the Persian mystic Rumi, "moves from unmarked box to unmarked box, from cell to cell. As rain water down into flower bed. As roses up from ground. Now it looks ...

In his book, Blue Like Jazz , Don Miller tells the story of his time as an evangelical Christian at the extremely liberal Reed College in Portland, Oregon. A part of the underlying theme of the boo...

Recently, I was working in my yard when the blooms on my gardenia plant caught my eye. I took off my gloves, laid my clippers aside, and allowed my mind to linger on those flowers. Inhaling the intoxi...

O Great Spirit, whose breath gives life to the world, and whose voice is heard in the soft breeze; We need your strength and wisdom. Cause us to walk in beauty. Give us the eyes ever to behold the red...

A wealthy Dutch collector was searching for a rare diamond to complete his collection. When a renowned New York dealer located the perfect stone, he invited the man to come see it in person. The Du...

Our lives are meant to inspire with (or inhale) the breath of God, the glory of his presence, the brilliance and beauty of his creation, and to expire (or exhale) an echo of wonder—an “amen.” It shoul...

Even for those of us who follow Jesus on a daily basis, the reality is, our sinful nature has infiltrated our minds, and we often find ourselves, either consciously or unconsciously, judging those aro...