What Can Evangelicals Teach Us About Beauty?

media release: Please join us for a Friday Night Lecture led by scholar and author Karen Swallow Prior, who will explore the connections between art, beauty, and the evangelical tradition. This sometimes-complicated relationship has important things to teach us about both art and the beautiful. She will also explore the human appetite for beauty and how it's all too easy to fill that appetite with poor substitutes. One such substitute is often branded as “evangelical” art and characterized as sentimental: It might produce good feelings, but does it satisfy our desire for the beautiful?

Dr. Prior will discuss these ideas, along with the roots and broad influence of sentimentality in evangelical art. She will invite us to consider what it means to pursue true beauty—art that inspires and transforms—even when it requires sacrifice.

Friday Night Lectures feature expert speakers and compelling content. The speaker provides three short lectures and responds to Q&A across the evening. Attendees interact with both the speaker and tablemates and enjoy beverages and hors d'oeuvres. Please join us!

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Karen Swallow Prior, Ph.D., is a reader, writer, and professor. Among her many publications are The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis (Brazos, 2023); and On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books (Brazos 2018). In addition to a monthly column for Religion News Service, her writing has appeared at Christianity Today, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, First Things, Vox, and The Gospel Coalition; she is also a contributing editor for Comment.

Prior’s academic focus is British literature, with a specialty in the eighteenth century, a period she loves for its emphasis on philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, community, and its efforts to correct the universal human impulse toward extremes. Learn more about Swallow Prior’s presentations and affiliations on her website.