If you have spent any amount of time in conservative Christian circles, undoubtedly you have sat through a talk lamenting the moral decay of the West. Unfortunately, there is a great deal of truth to these talks.  

I have often left feeling hopeless and anxious by the end despite these talks concluding with some rendition of “You are the light of the world.” I do not find this inspiring; if anything, I am irritated by leaders in conservative fields banging on to the youth with negativity instead of showing them what they should love and how to seek it out. 

Last year, my household started a small group affectionately named “Arts and Culture.”

Every week on a Tuesday evening, my household comes together to give our home an extra scrub and shine as we pull together every piece of beauty that we can get our hands on.  

We pick and arrange fresh flowers, light scented candles, dim the lights, play soft jazz, make a minimum of three pots of tea, and pull out our prettiest mugs and wine glasses. The sugared almonds and chocolate biscuits always make an appearance on our best serving ware. 

Slowly, our guests trickle in, and the laughter and chatter become louder and more joyous. The hostesses will not rest until every guest is seated with their tea of choice in hand.  

Once the scene is set and the atmosphere created, we read through or listen to whatever piece of art or culture has been selected for the evening. Then we talk. 

After doing this for a year, there are a couple of things that I have started to notice.  

My repeated experience of many forms of art is elevated by the experience and opinions of my peers. There is the amplification of understanding on two levels.  

Firstly, there is the accumulation of knowledge through reading various texts, listening to different composers, and watching thought-provoking movies. Secondly, there is the interrogation that occurs through many minds at work, which broadens my understanding beyond what I could have comprehended alone. 

Over the course of a full year, I have also found that different types of art talk to each other; you can follow the themes and ideas as they thread their way through paintings, poetry, essays, music, etc.  

Archetypes found in Euripides’ Medea, a play written roughly in 450 BC, resurface in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. And The Taming of the Shrew goes on to inform other elements of art and culture which inevitably finds its way into pop culture.  

These threads weave together into a complicated tapestry that can only be appreciated through time, effort, and the gathering of good people. 

It is pivotal that the next generation develops a sensitivity to beauty literacy. Photo: Unsplash.com.

This is what I like to call beauty literacy. This is the cross-section where truth, beauty, and goodness meet intellectual curiosity.  

This extends beyond the intellectual, though. It is a call to live out these esteemed values. In the instance of my arts and culture group, my household and I have enacted our ideals before we even get to the “business of the evening” by creating a sensuous presentation of beauty. Therefore, beauty literacy is the practice of inviting beauty into your life in all its forms. 

I think it is important to note that there are many different types of beauty as well. For example, most of the great Russian classics are consumed by the depiction of suffering.  

This too is beautiful. Through the depiction of something so fundamental about humanity, the condition of sin, a greater beauty is revealed—our need for redemption. 

There have been some confronting works that I have selected for our group to read, which lack goodness and beauty but contain fundamental truths about humanity. Truth has a certain beauty to it and deserves to be examined in its different facets. 

Our secular, fallen world is consumed with the false, the ugly, and the bad. Therefore, it is pivotal that the next generation, that my generation, develops a sensitivity to beauty literacy.  

Instead of being disheartened by the current state of affairs, we can use that as fuel to the fire. To hold steadfast to our ideals and come to embody them through one cup of tea, one candle, and one artwork at a time.