A new monthly feature from Canon Press.

From Doug Jones:
Never trust a book on aesthetics that lacks style. Sadly, that would wipe out most books on beauty. But not this one - Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just. It’s been out for a while (1999), and it’s not written from a Christian perspective, but it can provoke Christians down all sorts of interesting and surprising paths. Scarry not only shows how beauty urges us on to truth and goodness, she also, unknowingly backs into something of a Trinitarian and covenantal angle on beauty: “Beauty is, then, a compact, a contract” of a reciprocal “gift of life.” Wonderful work, and she argues tightly but not in typical, stilted, Anglo-American ways. One of the best parts is that her prose is always human and sensuous. Great fun. And moving. “Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people.” Read this book slowly a few times.