What Can Evangelicals Teach Us About Beauty? - Lecture 2

What happens when Christian art stops pointing to truth and starts reinforcing what we already believe? In Lecture 2, Karen Swallow Prior moves from historical foundations into the heart of her argument: that evangelicalism, shaped by activism, mass production, and Victorian sentimentality, developed a visual culture that often mistakes emotional response for genuine beauty.

Drawing on art history, literary criticism, philosophy, and theology, Prior traces how a movement rooted in the written word gradually built a rich — and complicated — visual world.

Topics covered in this lecture:

· William Wilberforce, Hannah More, and the use of art in the abolitionist movement

· Josiah Wedgwood's iconic antislavery medallion: "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?"

· Samuel Richardson and the birth of the English novel as an evangelical literary form

· How Jane Austen and Charles Dickens were shaped by evangelicalism and sentimentality

· Uncle Tom's Cabin as a sentimental novel — effective, but at what cost?

· The word aesthetics — its Greek roots, its connection to the body and the senses, and why it matters for understanding beauty

· The biblical Greek word kalon — beauty that is simultaneously moral and physical

· The Victorian "Awakening Conscience" painting as didactic, narrative art

· How the Industrial Revolution, mass production, and the cult of domesticity shaped evangelical visual culture

· Warner Sallman's Head of Christ (1940) — the most reproduced image of Jesus ever made, and what it reveals about how images form our imaginations

· Kitsch: what it is, where it comes from, and why it matters

· Milan Kundera's two-tier definition of kitsch from The Unbearable Lightness of Being

· Flannery O'Connor's provocative comparison of sentimentality to pornography — and why she's right

This lecture is part of the Friday Night Lecture Series hosted by the Stephen and Laurel Brown Foundation and New College Madison, whose mission is to lead Christian thought and formation to shape the University of Wisconsin community.

🎓 About the Speaker: Karen Swallow Prior Karen Swallow Prior is a scholar of British literature with a specialty in the 18th century. She holds a PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo and is the author of The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis (Brazos Press, 2023) and On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books (Brazos Press, 2018). Her writing has appeared in Christianity Today, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, First Things, Vox, and The Gospel Coalition, among others.

📚 Books & Works Referenced:

· The Evangelical Imagination — Karen Swallow Prior (Brazos, 2023)

· Pamela and Clarissa — Samuel Richardson

· Sense and Sensibility — Jane Austen

· Uncle Tom's Cabin — Harriet Beecher Stowe

· The Angel in the House — Coventry Patmore (poem)

· Head of Christ — Warner Sallman (1940, painting)

· The Awakening Conscience — William Holman Hunt (painting)

· The Unbearable Lightness of Being — Milan Kundera

· Flannery O'Connor on sentimentality and art

This event was recorded live at Upper House on March 14, 2025.

Karen Swallow Prior, evangelical imagination, Christianity and beauty, Christian aesthetics, evangelical art, sentimentality and faith, kitsch and Christianity, Victorian art, William Wilberforce, Hannah More, abolitionist movement, Samuel Richardson English novel, Josiah Wedgwood antislavery medallion, Warner Sallman Head of Christ, Flannery O'Connor sentimentality, Milan Kundera kitsch, aesthetics and Christianity, evangelical visual culture, mass production and religion, Victorian evangelicalism, Uncle Tom's Cabin, didactic art, evangelical history, New College Madison, Stephen and Laurel Brown Foundation, Madison Wisconsin, British literature, Christian thought, beauty truth and goodness, kalon Greek beauty