Think of a moment when you felt God’s nearness. And I mean felt, not as something you could explain or argue, but as a closeness that reached into the depth of your being in ways you could barely describe—and yet you knew.
My son had one of those experiences. He was on a work trip to Mexico City and took an afternoon to join a tour of the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. He was rushed and distracted, so he decided to return later on his own. On a long-distance video call that evening, his eyes wide with wonder, he described the experience. He was sitting quietly before the image of La Virgen preserved on Juan Diego’s tilma high above the main altar when, suddenly, he “knew” he was not alone. And then it hit him all at once that he was never alone. He felt La Virgen’s loving gaze fixed intently on him and became aware that my late mother (his beloved Abi) was sitting next to him in the pew, “like every time we went to Misa together when I was little.”
The whole experience felt familiar and natural; being there with a community in prayer was being en familia. In the beauty of that moment, he discovered that heaven and earth were not separate realities but instead one. My son was changed by that moment. In a world steeped in materialist cynicism, where our young struggle with disillusionment and despair, he had an experience of beauty so profound that it generated hope in him, a hope that keeps renewing itself. When his little blind dog was sick recently, he hung a small medal of La Virgen from his collar. God’s compassion knows no limits.
Maybe you have had such an experience of beauty. I hope so, because you also represent hope.
The experience my son had was not a private revelation but the fruit of a community—the loving work of generations who recognize the primal human need for beauty and continue to labor to make it perceptible. He benefited from artists and architects who envision ways to help us feel the power of beauty. He kept in his heart the stories that mothers and grandmothers recount of God’s loving presence. Most of all, he received the gift that countless communities of faith generously bestow on one another—the witness to being grafted into a larger story and the renewal this brings from generation to generation. This recognition and expansion of beauty as heaven’s solidarity with us has been central to the Christian faith from its very beginnings.
St. John Paul II, in his pastoral “Letter to Artists,” in a section titled “The ‘Beauty’ That Saves,” writes: “Faced with the sacredness of life and of the human person, and before the marvels of the universe, wonder is the only appropriate attitude.” The Christian imagination is that quality that allows us to push against the boundaries and apparent inevitability of an often painful what is into the possibility and healing of what could be by the light of our religious tradition. For Christians, this open possibility is the source of our hope in God’s reign, which is both here and not yet here. The reign is both breaking in and incomplete as it pulls us toward its fulfillment. The reign requires imagination, commitment and experiences of it, perceptible in beauty, to nourish it. The invitation to imagine expansively and the work of cultivating ways to do this are central to a faith that engages with the realities of this world and responds to the “signs of the times,” as the Second Vatican Council emphasized.
Start Here
Our theologies, the ways we speak of God and our relationship to God and to one another, must begin with what is happening around us. If we endeavor to attune ourselves to experiencing the world as it is, this will lead us through a process of interpreting and wrestling with reality. It is this process, done in community and by the light of Sacred Scripture and tradition, that blooms in an expansive imagination and can become effective action for the reign of God.
John Paul II wrote that “beauty will save the world”; in doing this he was echoing a long tradition uniting the aesthetic with the ethical. Sixteen years later, Pope Francis would also appeal to beauty as a powerful aid to building ecological solidarity, naming beauty and its effects over 40 times in his encyclical “Laudato Si’.” He writes: “Faith allows us to interpret the meaning and the mysterious beauty of what is unfolding” in the universe. He adds that Jesus “was able to invite others to be attentive to the beauty that there is in the world because he himself was in constant touch with nature, lending it an attention full of fondness and wonder.” The insight into the power of beauty encouraged ancient thinkers to identify qualities they called the universals, or the transcendentals. These were ways of experiencing reality and evaluating it that appeared to be so fundamental that they were shared across radically diverse human groups. So how can we unite around these principles?
Understand what is good. Despite differences across cultures, humans seem to share some basic understanding of what is good. Religious codes throughout the world often converge in defining what is good and what is not. Ancient peoples understood that there were markers in the ways life unfolded that showed what would help a community flourish and markers that conversely cried out “caution” and pointed to what would hinder and thwart a community’s survival. Good was real and so was evil, and the difference between them needed to be understood and acted upon.
Embrace what is true. Humans also seem to share an ability to assess what is true and what is not. These assessments of truthfulness are not connected to our simplistic modern idea of “the factual” but rather to a more robust and profound experience, the experience of wisdom resonant in the human heart. There are truths and there are also lies; and as history painfully shows, the difference between these is vital to the survival of a community. This difference also needs to be visible, understood and acted upon.
Behold beauty. Beyond goodness and truth, the ancients identified a third “universal,” and some of us give it pride of place because it validates the other two by attracting us and pointing us toward them. This is what we call beauty, and unlike some who would claim “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” reducing it to a purely subjective experience, those of us who argue for the transcendental power of beauty are closer to Shakespeare’s idea that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” The sweetness is universally felt, universally recognized and universally delightful, regardless of what name we might give it. What’s more, in a Christian understanding, beauty and our ability to recognize and love it originate in God’s abundant generosity and communicate God’s presence with us. As John Paul II puts it, beauty “has drawn its sap precisely from the mystery of the Incarnation.” This was the experience my son had.
Find strength in unity. The strength of the transcendentals is precisely in their unity and how they bring us to union with a mystery that wants to be known. If something is good, then it is also true and most assuredly beautiful. And since beauty is perceptible through our senses and thus present in the world, it can do the work of revealing the other two. Nothing can be beautiful if it lies or leads us into evil. Because of this, beauty’s opposite—ugliness—is also a valuable and powerful ethical marker that we must be capable of recognizing and acting upon. What I want to highlight here is that the events of our present day reveal that we have neglected to cultivate our ability to see true beauty and consequently have become blind to its heartbreaking absence in ugliness. This failure is playing a critical role in what is happening in our world. What happens when we can no longer recognize beauty? What happens when ugliness is camouflaged so we cannot see it? What is the outcome of losing our ability to discern the true and the good?
The Dangers of Our Present Age
A while back, I was at the movies and noticed that interspersed between the previews of coming attractions were scenes with soaring music and action-packed visuals. Their emotional appeal was not used to promote an upcoming film but instead to invite viewers to imagine themselves starring in a film. Well, not exactly a film: The overall message was that you, the viewer, can also be this exciting, attractive and important if you join the military. In a quantity I had never seen before, in ad after ad, young people there to see a film were asked to imagine war as trendy, guns as fashionable accessories and danger as alluring. This is not new.
An impostor has taken hold of our national imagination and broken up the unity between the good, the true and the beautiful. The reasons for this breakdown are varied and complicated: the advent of reality television in the 1990s; the explosion of social media; violent, role-playing video games; the loss of serious and committed journalism; the $11 billion spent on advertising in the last presidential election; the extraordinary financial resources poured out on frivolous and tawdry “beautification” campaigns in Washington, D.C.
That impostor is recognized and identified repeatedly in Scripture—think golden calf, think 30 pieces of silver, think the repeated and urgent warnings about the corrosive power of wealth. The impostor is glamour.
An oil-painted triptych from the late 15th century—“The Garden of Earthly Delights,” by Hieronymus Bosch—reveals how to battle the destructive power of glamour head on. Bosch exposed the ugliness of superficiality and narcissism, revealed the deceitfulness of status and power, and, in doing so, helped us see sin with clarity as it replicated itself, pointing us away from the good and ensnaring us in evil.
Our baptismal rite can remind us of the same. It preserves the memory of this insight as the elect are asked the questions: “Do you reject sin so as to live in the freedom of God’s children? Do you reject the glamour of evil and refuse to be mastered by sin?” As the theologian and cultural critic Gerald W. Schlabach wrote in America a decade ago, this question “is a rare case in which the church expects even comfortable, bourgeois Christians to renounce the culture that continues to clothe them, even though their original baptism already proclaimed the stripping of old ways.”
Today, as a theologian concerned with human rights, I see how the community-breaking aspirations of social climbing and material comfort cloaked in glamour have turned us against compassion. In our day, astuteness is defined as the opposite of empathy, and we have been sold an idolatrous worship of a testosterone-fueled drive to power that is raining bombs on the world.
If we dare an honest look, we can see how evil hides behind glamour, leading us away from truth and goodness and making us desire its lies and empty promises. Captivated by glamour, we forget our freedom as God’s children and are lured away, allowing evil to become our master.
How Ugliness Helps
If we cultivate our sensibility to it, ugliness can cause us to recoil from wrongful actions and from lies. Yet when ugliness is covered over by the veneer of the golden calf, it can be difficult to identify. This failure becomes manifest in the scapegoating of the vulnerable. Blaming the poor for obstructing our access to the shiny objects of false beauty supports consumerist aspirations, puts profits over people and replaces economic growth with economic domination. When glamour deceitfully promises a beauty that it cannot deliver, we humans are groping in the dark.
Our contemporary culture is making us prisoners of an aesthetics of greed and superficiality. Instead of understanding ourselves as part of the big story of our universe, we are goaded into selfishness and violence. In 2025, the U.S. Congress passed H.R. 1, incomprehensibly named the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to obscure the ugliness within its many pages. Among its uglier provisions: cutting access to health care for millions, deepening food insecurity for the poor, rolling back clean energy investments, encouraging extractive industries and undoing environmental protections. Inside this massive legislation, the gun lobby secured more deregulation, and the militarization of borders and cities came at the cost of lives while promising exorbitant profits for the defense industry. Evidently deceitful and harmful, the act was named “beautiful” to mock and obscure our ability to see the evil behind it. We should call this what it is: heresy. So how do we respond to the glamour of evil that has overtaken us?
We unmask it.
We can do this in many ways, but a good start is dismantling the propaganda machines that glamorize violence and use euphemisms to cover what is real. “Troops” don’t die; human beings die. There is no such thing as “collateral damage,” there is violent destruction. We are not helping “the less fortunate”; their lives are not the result of fortune not smiling on them but of systems that exploit and brutalize those who have no power, trapping them in precarity.
We are not a polarized society where two equal sides are vying for the support of its citizens. No, with every choice we make we need to discern not which side we are on, but how that choice will affect the poor, the immigrant, the vulnerable, the sick, our common home. We must be clear, focused and uncompromising—the Gospel does not provide two sides for how we are to live, only one “abundant life” (Jn 10:10). Beauty’s heartbreaking absence—the ugliness that is unleashed when lies and evil rule—has to guide our work for the reign of God. Ugliness, seen clearly, will point us away from evil and toward the good.
God’s Love, Present
The Scriptures insist that our ultimate act of loving God is to make God, who is love, present as we unconditionally and fully love each other. As with all the teachings of Jesus, this is not merely talk. Jesus’ life and violent death add the ultimate reversal to the condition of disloyalty and broken relationships of human history. He dies as a direct result of betrayal, trampled by the dazzling glamour of Rome and the collusion of those who wanted a share in Rome’s power. He is abandoned, forgotten, marked as a criminal. It is this act of starkly unveiling our selfishness through his active solidarity with the most despised of the world that unleashes resurrected love in history. The true measure of beauty is Christ on the cross, giving up his life for his friends (Jn 15:13), while commanding us to love one another as he has loved us.
Christian love guided by such beauty can have no conditions, and because of this is untamable and incorruptible. The gaze of La Virgen is on us and with her all the saints who came before us. We are not alone. Pope Paul VI famously counseled, “If you want peace, work for justice.” I will add: If you want justice, work for beauty; and wherever beauty is absent, create it. We have very hard work to do, possibly the hardest work of our lives in a world that is terribly broken but also full of grace because you are here, we are here, and the reign of God continues breaking in.
This article appears in November 2026.
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