What Can Evangelicals Teach Us About Beauty? - Lecture 3

What does it actually mean for something to be beautiful — and how do we learn to recognize it? In this third and final lecture, Karen Swallow Prior draws together the historical, theological, and philosophical threads from the series into a compelling answer: beauty is not a luxury, a feeling, or a cultural preference. It is a transcendental — as foundational to human flourishing as truth and goodness — and it calls us.

This lecture is the most personal and most philosophical of the three. Prior shares the story of her own awakening to beauty as an isolated Christian doctoral student at a secular university, reflects on the hunger she sees among younger evangelicals for something more than sentimentality, and offers a framework — rooted in Aquinas, Augustine, James K.A. Smith, and Scripture itself — for what genuine beauty demands of us.

What you'll discover in this lecture:

· Why cultivating taste for beauty is something we must intentionally pursue — like learning to appreciate good food, music, or literature

· The difference between "it is good" (objective) and "I like it" (subjective) — and why closing that gap matters theologically

· Frank Birch Brown's Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste on aesthetics and religious identity

· The transcendentals: truth, goodness, and beauty as inseparable, universal goods — rooted in Greek philosophy, confirmed by Christian theology

· Thomas Aquinas's three properties of beauty: proportion, luminosity, and integrity

· How the Greek word kalon (beauty/goodness) connects etymologically to the word call — beauty doesn't just move us, it summons us

· Why abstract art — not just representational Christian imagery — speaks to genuine aesthetic experience

· The pendulum swing: how evangelicals are beginning to recover a hunger for transcendent beauty beyond clichés and "cheesy worship songs"

· James K.A. Smith on liturgical habits, desire, and the claim that "we are desiring creatures before we are thinking creatures"

· Makoto Fujimura — painter, writer, and Prior's favorite contemporary evangelical artist

· How the word beatitudes shares a root with the word beautiful — and what Jesus's Sermon on the Mount reveals about the shape of a beautiful life

· Augustine's breathtaking prayer from the Confessions: "Late have I loved thee, O beauty, so ancient and so new..."

· Prior's personal story: a fax machine, a secular English department, and the question that launched a lifelong pursuit of beauty

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.

📚 Thinkers, Works & Ideas Referenced:

· Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste — Frank Birch Brown

· Thomas Aquinas on proportion, luminosity, and integrity

· Augustine, Confessions — "Late have I loved thee, O beauty..."

· James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom and Image Magazine

· Makoto Fujimura — abstract painter and Christian artist

· The Beatitudes (Matthew 5) and the shared root of beatitude and beauty

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

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

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