- “1Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. 3No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. 4They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. 5There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever. 6The angel said to me, “These words are trustworthy and true. The Lord, the God of the spirits of the prophets, sent his angel to show his servants the things that must soon take place.””
source: Revelation 22 - “Liturgy is like a strong tree whose beauty is derived from the continuous renewal of its leaves, but whose strength comes from the old trunk, with solid roots in the ground.”
by Pope Paul VI - “By the words ‘Christian Art’ I do not mean Church art…I mean Christian art in the sense of art which bears within it the character of Christianity…It is the art of redeemed humanity.”
by Jacques Maritain “Christian Art,” Art & Scholasticism - “Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.”
by Blaise Pascal - “If God counts the hairs of each of their heads, if none are excluded from the salvation the Crucifixion offers, who will venture to exclude them from earthly blessings and esteem; pronounce this life unnecessary, that one better terminated or never begun? I never experienced so perfect a sense of human equality as with Mother Teresa among her poor. Her love for them, reflecting God’s love, makes them equal, as brothers and sisters within a family are equal, however widely they differ in intellectual and other attainments, in physical beauty and grace.”
by Malcolm Muggeridge Something Beautiful for God - “It was when I was happiest that I longed most…The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing…to find the place where all the beauty came from.”
by C. S. Lewis Till We Have Faces - “By a curious blend of these currents of religious faith and scholarship with the no less powerful influences of skepticism and religious relativism, the universality-with-particularity of Jesus has thus become an issue not only for Christians in the 20th century, but for humanity. As respect for the organized church has declined, reverence for Jesus has grown. For the unity and variety of the portraits of “Jesus through the centuries’’ has demonstrated that there is more in him than is dreamt of in the philosophy and Christology of the theologians. Within the church, but also far beyond its walls, his person and message are, in the phrase of Augustine, a “beauty ever ancient, ever new,” and now he belongs to the world.”
by Jaroslav Pelikan Jesus Through the Centuries - “One thing have I asked of the LORD,
that will I seek after:
that I may dwell in the house of the LORD
all the days of my life,
to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD
and to inquire in his temple.”
source: A Psalm of David - “The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.”
by Fyodor Dostoevsky The Brothers Karamazov - “Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.”
by Fyodor Dostoevsky The Brothers Karamazov - “What makes for a good, Christian movie? In brief, a good, Christian movie is one that is well-crafted and true. A film that does not strive for artistic and aesthetic excellence cannot be a good film. It will be a shoddy or uneven film, making whatever story or message is being told almost impossible to digest, no matter how biblically sound it is. Likewise, a film that does not bear allusive witness to the truth cannot be a good film. This phrase “allusive witness” is intentional, for we are not suggesting the evangelistic film. We’re suggesting rather the film that witnesses allusively, obliquely, to the splendor of goodness, the shabbiness of sin, the hunger to be forgiven, the yearning for the divine, the playfulness of creation—all things true—in films such as Dead Man Walking, Glory, To Kill a Mockingbird, Blade Runner, Babette’s Feast, Henry V, and Chariots of Fire.”
by W. David O. Taylor Christianity Today, What Is a Good Christian Movie, Anyway?, posted 7/13/04 - “Love is the beauty of the soul.”
by Saint Augustine - “I have learnt to love you late, Beauty at once so ancient and so new!”
by Saint Augustine - “…What is human work but a participation in divine creation? What is leisure but an anticipation of the unlabored life of heaven? What does the artist do but restore creation to its divine origin and end? Beauty in all its material and practical expressions exists to draw humanity into the redeeming beauty of God. This is surely what Dostoevsky had in mind when one of his characters in The Idiot declares that `beauty will save the world.'
…The Church today can play a role in bringing the arts back from alienation from the transcendent—an alienation that has led the arts themselves into severe disorientation and crisis. Church art programs can elevate and ennoble what beauty exists in the human city and among its artists and poets.”
by Monsignor M. Francis Mannion The Church and The City, First Things, February 2000 - “The thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was a small and passing thing: there was Light and High Beauty forever beyond its reach.”
by J. R. R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings - “The arts and the sciences do have a place in the Christian life — they are not peripheral. For a Christian, redeemed by the work of Christ and living within the norms of Scripture and under the leadership of the Holy Spirit, the Lordship of Christ should include an interest in the arts. A Christian should use these arts to the glory of God — not just as tracts, but as things of beauty to the praise of God. And art work can be a doxology in itself.”
by Francis A. Schaeffer Art and the Bible - “The Christian is the one whose imagination should fly beyond the stars.”
by Francis A. Schaeffer Art and the Bible - “If Christianity is really true, then it involves the whole man, including his intellect and creativeness. Christianity is not just “dogmatically” true or “doctrinally” true. Rather, it is true to what is there, true in the whole area of the whole man in all of life.”
by Francis A. Schaeffer Art and the Bible - “The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education–or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments–is antieducational obscurantism. It is foisted on us by the pedants and snobs of Hellenistic Greece who considered artistic performance fit only for slaves…”
by Peter Drucker Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New ‘Post-Modern’ World (1959) - “The arts help us to perceive and/or build connections everywhere. By so doing, they allow us: a) to rebuild the sympathetic universe that the medievals saw and that Dante embodied most fully; 2) to see that Christ fulfills not only the Jewish Law/Prophets but all the deepest philosophical, theological, and aesthetic yearnings of mankind; 3) to be better evangelists and apologists through an ability to re-incarnate the Gospel in a variety of different cultures; 4) to praise God through a symphony of voices.”
by Louis Markos Cornerstone Magazine, The Importance of the Arts to Christianity, posted June 25, 2003 - “Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul.”
by Saint Augustine - “Beauty is indeed a good gift of God; but that the good may not think it a great good, God dispenses it even to the wicked.”
by Saint Augustine - “We are hurt; we are lonely; and we turn to music or words, and as compensation beyond all price we are given glimpses of the world on the other side of time and space. We all have glimpses of glory as children, and as we grow up we forget them, or are taught to think we made them up; they couldn’t possibly have been real, because to most of us who are grown up, reality is like radium, and can be borne only in very small quantities. But we are meant to be real, and to see and recognize the real. We are all more than we know, and that wondrous reality, that wholeness, holiness, is there for all of us, not the qualified only.”
by Madeleine L’Engle Walking on Water - “That is one of the functions of art: to present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude.”
by C. S. Lewis - “The essence of the Christian faith…is that Jesus frees us from the “curse of the law.” We are forgiven and accepted just as we are, no longer burdened by an impossible weight of duty. But since we have been loved at such great cost, (“God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that all who believe I Him should not perish but have everlasting life,: John 3:16), we respond with grateful love in turn. Now we do our best to keep God’s law, because we are irresistibly drawn nearer his beauty and perfection.”
by Frederica Mathewes Green At The Corner of East and Now
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