Beauty

Review: Theo of Golden

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Cover image of "Theo of Golden" by Allen Levi

Theo of Golden

Theo of Golden, Allen Levi. Atria Books (ISBN: 9781668236512) 2025.

Summary: An old man moves to Golden, sees portraits in a coffee shop and in powerful personal encounters gives them to their owners.

I think I’m a latecomer to the Theo of Golden party. For months everyone who has read this book, including friends with discriminating book judgment, have raved about this book. Truthfully, I feared buying the book and being disappointed. Instead, I was won over from his first portrait bestowal to Minnette. For those who haven’t yet read, the story in brief is this:

An old man, Theo moves from New York City to the southern town of Golden to look after his properties. On visiting the local coffee shop, he notices the pencil-drawn portraits of local residents. He conceives the plan to give them to their proper owners. He purchases them, works with Mrs. Gidley, the administrator for James Ponder, whose vacant apartment he has rented, to contact each with a personal note. In it he invites them to meet him at a particular bench by a fountain known as the Fedder..

Along the way, he becomes deeper friends with some of the residents. James Ponder becomes not only advisor but friend and confidant. Others include Tony, a Vietnam vet bookstore owner, a little girl, Lamisha, with extensive injuries from a car crash, an eccentric, homeless cyclist, Ellen and a gifted young cellist, Simone. Then there is his deepening friendship with the artist of the portraits, Asher Glissen.

I won’t go further than that in the plot except to note we know little of Theo’s background except that he grew up in Portugal, lost a daughter, and obviously is a man of great means. What we do learn, and what makes this book so compelling is the humble and beautiful character of Theo.

What most seems to stand out is how fully present he is to each person he meets. Instead of talking about himself, he listens to and draws out stories, making people feel safe with him. Theo even wins the trust of Ellen, the eccentric homeless woman, with whom he eventually goes on a bike adventure, something no one has ever done. He notices and names. He studies each portrait and then speaks of what he sees in that person from what they’ve said and what he sees. Then he gently invites them to live into what he has named.

He loved beauty and joy. Whether it was evening reveries by the Oxbow River, delight in a street musician, or enjoyment of a rare bottle of port with his bookstore friend on that man’s birthday, he had a great capacity to take joy in beauty. We learn that giving away portraits in Golden has been the happiest time of his life.

Yet he was a man who knew deep sadness in a romance broken off, and the death of his daughter. One of the most profound passages, in which he names a gift of the artist, Asher Glissen is about sadness. He has just observed that he sees sadness in every portrait of Glissen’s.

“It is a very high compliment, young man. A very high compliment indeed. Perhaps I am mistaken but, at some point, if we are wise, we must all confront our sadness, our brokenness, our disappointment. I am quite certain that your portraits help some people in a very tender and courteous way, to ask themselves, maybe for the first time, ‘Who is that person? What do I know to be true, really true, about that face?…Asher, we are masters at masking our sadness, but deep down inside, if we are honest, we know that there is an unsatisfied longing deep inside all of us. Your portraits invite people to be alone and quiet and truthful with themselves, to admit the longing and to discover the goodness in their sadness. Maybe?”

Asher is also one who notices and names through his portraits.

Finally, Theo is a man of deep faith. While Tony, the bookstore owner scoffs at the idea, Theo quietly hopes in heaven. This vision of heaven is evident in the Christmas gifts he gives. He invites Simone, the cellist, to play for the angels. He calls the little girl, Lamisha, a daughter of the King. And he writes to Asher,

“It is an imponderable thought that the Giver of Faces, the face of heaven itself, the face for which every heart yearns, became a wee babe, misty-eyed and helpless, looking Himself for the tender face of his mother on the night of the angels.”

I understand why this book has touched the hearts of many. We are confronted with heartlessness in our media every day. Levi’s book speaks to a yearning in us that believes “another life is possible” as my friends in the Bruderhof describe it. Theo embodies that life. His presence paints a picture of the Christ-transformed life. He incarnates the deep humility, gentleness, generosity, playfulness, and compassion of the Lord of heaven. And quietly, Theo of Golden invites us into that same kind of life.

Review: Remember the Sweetness

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Cover image of "Remember the Sweetness" by Polly Giantonio

Remember the Sweetness

Remember the Sweetness, Polly Giantonio. Rootstock Publishing (ISBN: 9781578693993) 2026.

Summary: A debut poetry collection capturing memories of beauty, loss, love, and family, both ordinary and profound.

When one thinks of “debuts” one often thinks of a budding young artist. However, what one encounters in this debut collection of poems are the reflections of one who has lived with life’s joys and vicissitudes. This allows Polly Giantonio to remember young love, view paintings in a gallery, or glimpse the seeming commonplaces of rural Vermont life with a richness of lived experience.

The collection opens with “The Praying Mantis.” We see with her the greenness of the “emerald queen,” hands cupped like “a baby sleeping” who is yet part of the “mystics in meditation.” We go blueberry picking with her. And we remember with her being toddlers with blue stains on our cheeks gobbling palmfuls of blueberries.

Other poems are memories of youth. “Surprise” reminds us of being sick at home when a parent brought something special. “The Dandelion” traces an arc from childhood to her own motherhood and the challenge of releasing a child.

She remembers in “Beyond” launching out in life, parting from Mom to go to art school. She discovers the adult challenge of halting “the ticker tape of life’s chatter.” Paintings figures in several poems, one by Bouguereau, another by Hopper, and a third by Rodin, The Kiss. While the mother notices the man’s hand on the woman’s hip, the child is focused on a caterpillar!

The most poignant of the poems describe moments as Giantonio walks with both parents and her brother toward their deaths. Presence with each of them recalls the past, whether her “teenage shitshow” with her father or her first smoke with her brother, dying of “damaged lungs.” Most striking is the moment shared at her mother’s vanity bench. Her mother gives her a string of pearls, a gift from Polly and her father. Then she looks at her “head of chemo fuzz,” decides she needs some red lipstick, and then asks Polly to use this for her viewing.

Some poems capture the contemporary realities we face. What climate change will mean for our grandchildren. Isolating together during Covid. In another, we hear the virus’ chilling prophecy: I am a virus that will mutate and survive.

Yet life’s harsh realities fail to overshadow the everyday wonders of owls, “October’s Confetti,” “Winter Thaw,” and the “Peony.” Giantonio captures the preciousness of our lives including our rebellions and mistakes, the hard and sacred work of accompanying the dying, and the appearances of beauty that points to “something more” in our lives. This debut collection features the mature insight of one who reflects deeply on her life, her family, and her place.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers Program.

Review: Beguiled By Beauty

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Beguiled By Beauty, Wendy Farley. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2020.

Summary: A book on the contemplative life encompassing all of life as well as specific practices, written on the “borderlands” of Christian faith.

Wendy Farley sees contemplation as not mere practice (although practice is important to her) but a seamless part of a life of knowing the Beloved, being the beloved and loving others amid the suffering and beauty of the world. In our present, perilous times she believes that “a contemplative way of life may contribute to the capacity to endure these times with an open and courageous heart” (p. 3).

She describes herself as living and writing on the borderlands. She draws not only on contemplatives from the Christian tradition but upon other contemplatives as well and practices such as yoga that come from outside the Christian tradition. She avoids the use of the word “God,” which may carry mis- and preconceptions, using a number of other terms: “Beloved, Divine Mother, Goodness, Bright Abyss, Divine Emptiness, Dance, Spirit, Lady Love, Wisdom, as well as others” (p. 5).

Farley grounds the contemplative life in the realities that we were made for the Beloved and to apprehend the beauty of the world. She speaks of our forgetfulness of the divine and the awakening of the heart to the beloved. It is often the case that our hearts awaken to the Beloved through the beauty of the world, that in loving the beauty of the world, we love the Beautiful One. To love beauty is to be moved to compassion for suffering and as we come alive to the world, we come alive to it needs.

Practice is important and the remainder of the book explores various aspects of our practice as part of a seamless contemplative life. The practice of unceasing prayer and the balance of inner and communal practices, the elements of both structure and improvisation are part of this life. She explores the dispositions of mind and heart–of living in nonjudgement, peacefulness and relinquishment and wonder and adventure. She speaks of watching the mind including the importance of gratitude and guarding the heart, including the role of and our response to suffering in our formation. The final chapter discusses additional contemplative practices.

Farley writes from a life of contemplation and the text is rich, each sentence worthy of contemplation, meaning this is a book to be read slowly, a contemplative act in itself. One senses a person captivated by the Beloved, by beauty, and the wonder of our existence who can guide in this life. Her use of feminine language for the Divine will be a breath of fresh air for some, and perhaps a cause for apprehension for others. Likewise, her openness to contemplative and meditative traditions outside the Christian tradition may appeal to those on the “borderlands” and less so for more theologically conservative Christians. I would suggest that a work like this (and really anything we read!) be read discerningly. Farley has much to offer in terms of her love for the beloved, and especially for the ways she connects that love to the beauty of the world and a life of compassion that cares about justice. For those alienated by so much ugliness in the church and unloving versions of orthodoxy, this work may help in recapturing the wonder of both the Beloved and the Beloved’s world.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher through Speakeasy.

Review: Tending the Fire That Burns at the Center of the World

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Tending the Fire That Burns at the Center of the World, David F. White. Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2022.

Summary: An argument for the important role of aesthetics, of beauty, in Christian formation.

Since the Enlightenment, the formation of Christians in their faith has emphasized truth and goodness, reason and praxis, discarding aesthetics. David F. White argues for the recovery of a theologically shaped aesthetic in the church’s effort to form her people. He argues that the consequence of the neglect of beauty has been an excarnate spirituality, divorced from the materiality of being human in God’s good creation.

White begins by considering beauty as a phenomenon pervading all existence from microscopic life to the cosmos. He explores how beauty awakens us to the transcendent, displaces us from the center of existence, draws us into community, and bids us into living worthy lives. From this, he turns to the theological aesthetic of Hans Urs von Balthasar, his aesthetic epistemology and how this leads to our attunement to beauty in creation and the re-enchantment of the world.

Ultimate, an aesthetic of beauty finds its focus in the person of Christ who reveals the beauty of God.in human form. He encourages focus upon the material form of Christ, and a kind of attuned play with the narratives of his life, imagining them, and embodying them ourselves. This leads him into the poiesis or ideas of making of John Milbank. Making begins with the transcendent God who comes as verbum, speech that makes, creates. Humans in the image of God are called into participation in this making as a gift. Formation then cannot remain in our heads; we must get our hands dirty, engaging in a kind of reciprocal gift-giving with others.

White next focuses on liturgy as art. He draws on the insights of James K. A. Smith and the power of liturgies to form us, whether from the church or the culture and he considers how aesthetics can enhance the formative power of liturgy, particularly as beauty is understood as the telos of worship. He urges leaders to recover a vision of the beauty inherent in the rhythms and movements of liturgy, to weave artistic expression throughout and to use the eucharistic meal to focus on the beauty in the form of Christ.

We live in a world that alternates between beauty and terror and White advocates for the role of art in the movement from lament to hope. A theological aesthetic looks for the beauty of people amid brokenness, glimpsing healing amid suffering. He concludes with the image of a church of people formed by beauty as the flash mob interrupting the stale banality of modern life with sounds and sights of exquisite beauty reminding people of the other, better world for which they deeply long.

White, I believe, has made an important proposal in this book, that the church vitally needs to recover a theologically grounded aesthetic. This is more than just embracing the arts. It is understanding the role of beauty, with its focus on both the materiality of creation and Christ, in forming us as knowing makers, participating in God’s poiesis in the world. White takes a deep dive in attempting to summarize von Balthasar, Milbank, and Smith yet ably does so, weaving together their ideas with his own vision of a theological aesthetic. Like White, I’ve been captivated by flash mob videos and like him, I long that the church might captivate the world in this way.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher through Speakeasy.

Review: A Peculiar Orthodoxy

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a peculiar orthodoxy

A Peculiar Orthodoxy, Jeremy S. Begbie. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018.

Summary: A collection of essays exploring the intersection of theology and the arts.

In recent years there has been an upsurge of conversation relating theology and the arts. One of the leading lights in this conversation is Jeremy S. Begbie, both a trained theologian, and gifted pianist. This work is a collection of essays given as academic presentations, and thus, the reader will encounter some overlap of ideas and themes, but also a rich appreciation of both art and orthodox theology.

Begbie begins with Bach and the subject of beauty. Beauty as one of the transcendentals is often related back to Platonic thought, but Begbie argues for an understanding of beauty in light of the Trinitarian God and then uses Bach’s Goldberg Variations to explore how Bach’s religious beliefs are evident in his music. A companion essay follows dealing with the resistance to an idea of beauty that often reduces to sentimentality, and doesn’t deal with the existence of ugliness, evil, suffering and pain in life. Begbie argues that the Triduum of Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter reveals a perspective in which God enters into human suffering fully and works redemptively. This is a beauty that does not hide from or hide evil, but works restoratively.

A fascinating essay follows, “Faithful Feelings,” that explores the connection between music and emotion and suggests that music may concentrate, indeed purify emotion. Likewise in worship, our emotional lives are concentrated and purifies in the worship of the Triune God, and that the use of music in worship ought to be shaped by a congruency between music, and the theological truth being expressed.

Both the fourth and seventh essays address music and natural theology using the work of David Brown who has written extensively on classical music and belief. Begbie would contend for the specificity of orthodoxy in these discussions rather than the more inclusive theism of Brown. Begbie argues that our thinking about the arts must be shaped by a trinitarian, indeed Christ-centered understanding.

Between these essays are two focused on particular works, one of music, one written. The musical work is Edward Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, in which Begbie explore the ambivalence in John Henry Newman’s portrayal of purgatory in the words, carried over into the musical setting of these by Elgar–a movement between confidence and anxiety. This is followed by an analysis of George Herbert’s poem, “Ephes. 4.30”, and the link Herbert portrays here between the arts and the Holy Spirit.

Perhaps the essay I found most fascinating was the eighth, exploring the ideas of music, space, and freedom. He proposes that often we have difficulties with questions of the one and the many, or the intersection of divine and human freedom because of perceiving these in terms of either visual or material space. He observes that music opens up another way of conceiving of these in which multiple tones may occupy the same aural space simultaneously, with none being cancelled out, and if anything, producing a richer and more interesting sound than a single tone, whether harmonious or dissonant.

The collection concludes with Begbie’s thoughts on the contribution of Reformed theology to the arts. His discussion of Reformed perspectives on “beauty” and “sacrament” help sharpen the creature, Creator distinction, and clarify the fuzziness with which these ideas are often thrown around in art and theology discussions. He addresses the Reformed commitment to the word as both significant in God’s self-communication, and yet also complemented by other media that communicate realities for which words alone are inadequate.

Reflecting Begbie’s musical training, the essays tend to focus more on musical than other forms of art. As a choral singer and lay theologian, I did not mind this. His thoughts about beauty and sentiment reminded me of singing the second movement of Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms in which the pastoral beauty of Psalm 23 is juxtaposed with Psalm 2 and the dissonant raging of the nations against God. The evocative power of music and the alignment of music and words to express truth in worship was powerfully apparent when we performed Ola Gjeilo’s Dark Night of the Soul that seems to capture the stillness of the soul facing the dark, and the wonder of the sheer grace of God that one finds in this setting of St. John of the Cross’s meditation. There is the wonder (when it happens) of many voices singing different parts coming together as a single entity–where the singing of individuals didn’t cancel out each other but create something more than our separate voices.

Begbie’s essays made me reflect on these experiences and gave theological content to them. The essays are written at an academic level, for academic conferences, but reward careful reading with insight. This is a great service for artists, who seek not merely technical proficiency, but to write, or sing, or play, or dance, or act, or paint with an authenticity that reflects our deepest loves, and for the Christian, the connection of our work with the Creator’s story.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own

Review: Beauty for Truth’s Sake

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Beauty for Truths Sake

Beauty for Truth’s Sake, Stratford Caldecott, (foreword Ken Myers). Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2017 (my review is of the 2009 edition).

Summary: An argument for the unity of faith and reason, beauty and truth, the sciences and the humanities, and for the recovery of education as a lifelong pursuit of wisdom, both rooted in and eventuating in liturgical worship.

As one who has long worked around universities, the fragmentation of knowledge among the disparate disciplines is an established fact. Those who teach in the humanities, and in the sciences often hold each other in mutual suspicion if not contempt, and speak in languages often unintelligible to each other. One of the few things that unites a number of these people is a shared suspicion toward religious faith (sometimes, but not always, warranted by stupid or wicked things done in God’s name).

In this work, Stratford Caldecott contends for an ancient, and yet contemporary vision of a restored unity of knowledge that brings together arts and humanities, math and the sciences, the beautiful and the true, reason and faith in a “re-enchantment” of education that leads to wisdom, and worship. He writes in his Introduction:

“I believe it is possible to remain an active learner throughout life, and yet to maintain a moral compass in good working order. But vital though they are, adaptability and ethics are not enough by themselves. There is a structural flaw in our education that we need to overcome. It is related to a profound malaise in our civilization, which by progressive stages has slipped into a way of thinking and living that is dualistic in character. The divisions between arts and sciences, between faith and reason, between nature and grace, have a common root. In particular, our struggle to reconcile religious faith with modern science is symptomatic of a failure to understand the full scope of human reason and its true grandeur” (p. 12).

Caldecott would argue that our modern fragmented education divorces meaning from fact, dooming the humanities to solipsism and the sciences to sterility. He would argue, along with Dorothy Sayers (in The Lost Tools of Learning) for a restoration of the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, and an adaptation of the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music, expanded for additional disciplines). He believes that the key to the unity of these disciplines is beauty, which serves as a pointer to truth, as well as goodness. He connects the recovery of the poetic imagination with its focus on symbol to the recognition of the symbolic in the scientific study of the natural world, opening us to the wonder of what is beyond. He explores the beauty and symbolism in math and geometry, the structure and beauty of music, and concludes with how this “re-enchanted” cosmology finds its consummation in liturgy.

What I most appreciated in this work is the sense of the recovery of wonder in our inquiry. In the modern academy, it seems that one of the prices paid for advancing in proficiency, whether in “getting good data” in science, or in applying critical theory to historical events or literary works is the loss of wonder–the joy of a good story, admiration for a historical figure, appreciation of the structure of the cosmos. Certainly this is not always so, but to see the wide-eyed wonder of young scholars replaced by cynicism is grievous whenever it happens, and I cannot help but think that the educational flaws Caldecott critiques contribute to this loss.

Where Caldecott may be critiqued is in his “Christian Platonism” that views our language, our numbers, our physical world pointing to a world beyond–the world of forms, ideas, perhaps all found in the mind or person of God. I have to confess that I don’t have the philosophical wherewithal to critique or defend this idea, and I haven’t thought of things in quite these terms. I do believe that all human artistry, and the artistry of the physical world is a reflection of the Great Artist in a general sense. But I’m not as sure about the effort to “symbolize” all physical reality as a signifier of transcendent reality. There is something that feels as if it could be forced to me, akin to those who try to find some spiritual lesson in everything and sometimes reach some pretty wacky conclusions. I think I’d rather be open to beauty where I find it, to be attentive to what it points toward, and aware that we sing God’s songs, and think his thoughts after Him.

I’m not sure if that makes me a Christian Platonist or not. And perhaps that points to the goodness of this book, that it is making me think and re-examine my own understanding. It makes me think about how I relate goodness, truth, and beauty, how it is that I can claim reason and faith are not at odds and that there is an underlying unity to all knowledge. It poses the question to me in my work of how I can claim to suggest that the integration of faith, learning, and practice are a possibility in the modern university, and not just a slogan. Most of all, it inspires me afresh to think of how wonder might lead to doxology.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.