Insights: Spring 2021 "Introduction"

A seven-year-old Church of Christ kid from Mississippi went with his father to Baltimore, where his uncle and dad took him to an unforgettable evening watching the Orioles play baseball at Memorial Stadium. Reflecting on that experience later, he remembered that “it was the most beautiful thing I had ever witnessed. I left the ballpark that night with a mysterious ache to be part of such poetry.” Naturally, the boy went on to play Little League baseball and to learn from it. Years later as a theologian, he kept pondering the beauty of baseball—and the beauty of, well, beauty! With the help of such scholars as Elaine Scarry, John Locke, Simone Weil, J.R.R. Tolkien, St. Augustine, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and perhaps especially Hans Urs von Balthasar, the Little Leaguer-cum-theologian now, blessedly, labors on this campus and continues to plumb the depths of beauty. Spoiler alert: it’s about more than just baseball. Beauty suggests, Professor David White says, “an ontology, an epistemology, and an ethics.” It is ubiquitous, “a ‘wake-up call’ to the plenitude of life.” It is “a chain joining finity and infinity, this world and the depths of God.” Indeed White says, “We as the church are called to be Christ’s living body, manifesting God’s beauty ‘in the style of love,’ and beauty can be our first word as we advance God’s will on earth …”

White’s lead article beckons us to consider beauty in the church’s ministry— not just by paying attention to beautiful things, but finally by becoming beautiful things. He is joined in this issue of Insights by others manifesting God’s beauty. Courtney Goto, especially in this pandemic time when all of us are disconnected from the holy spaces where our religious communities’ altars are located, writes of working with her students at Boston University School of Theology to create “home altars,” and she invites us to experience the creativity of building our own. Expressing beauty as an act of “uncrippling” happens in many ways. Dessa Quesada Palm, a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) mission co-worker and the artistic director of theater arts for young creatives in the Philippines, observes that the work of young people telling their stories through theater—“imploring communities to listen, to feel, and to act in ways to change the situation”—is their way of “praising God and inviting people to heed the Lord’s prayer that God’s ‘will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’” Old Testament professor Suzie Park reflects upon the role that beauty plays in mending “fractured familial relationships”—among biblical characters as well as those whom we call family. And Frank Rogers Jr., tells the astonishing story surrounding Sixto Rodriguez—“equal parts street poet, social critic, and troubadour holy man”—which illustrates how, as Rogers warns, “Life’s sacred right to flourish is being marred. Beauty is violated.”

This issue of Insights explores beauty from many angles. Read on—it is beautiful!

By Theodore J. Wardlaw, President of Austin Seminary