Rejoicing in the Works of the Lord

Cover

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Title Page, Copyright

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Contents

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p. iii-iii

Abbreviations

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p. iv-iv

Preface

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pp. v-vii

The young monk, Adso of Melk, musters his best aesthetic sensibilities to decipher the grand door of a Benedictine monastery, as he accompanies the wry English Franciscan, William of Baskerville in a medieval murder mystery. Not a few readers...

Introduction

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pp. 1-8

I will never forget the first time I visited the beautiful gothic cathedral of Chartres, France. It was during my junior-year abroad and I was studying in Paris. A friend and I decided to travel to Chartres for a Sunday liturgy. As we walked from the train station...

Franciscans and Beauty

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pp. 9-20

“Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new.”⁴ With these words, Augustine of Hippo captured his experience of conversion and discovery of God as Love beyond any he had ever known. Throughout his life’s journey, through trials...

The Beauty of Creation

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pp. 21-36

No experience of beauty is too small to merit our attention. Even the most minor experience of beauty stops us short, and causes us to re-think what we have taken for granted: that we understand the whole of life and all reality. Indeed, the experience of the beautiful...

The Beauty of the Human Heart

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pp. 37-53

For medieval thinkers, beauty was not simply understood as the object of human desire, contemplation and love. Beauty framed a spiritual journey of transformation: a via pulchritudinis. We become what we love. Just as the world around us gives...

The Franciscan Path of Transformation into Beauty

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pp. 55-66

In a recent series of lectures published under the title, On Beauty and Being Just,⁶⁹ Professor Elaine Scarry argues in favor of the recovery of beauty and of a renewed sense of the beautiful as object for contemporary intellectual discussion. This recovery is...

Conclusions Toward a Franciscan aesthetic

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pp. 67-73

In his classic work, The Glory of the Lord, Hans Urs von Balthasar argues that a culture that loses a sense of what is beautiful is drawn to forget both what is true and what is good.⁸⁷ Within the thought of Bonaventure and Scotus we have discovered the metaphysical and moral...

Select Bibliography

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pp. 75-78