What does beauty have to do with healing the fragmentation within our churches? According to Michael Pasquarello, everything. Amid the cacophony of ugly political invective that dominates nearly every space today—including church—only God has the power to unify and heal through his truth and goodness, revealed in his beauty. And every Sunday, those in the pulpit have the opportunity and responsibility to share this beauty with their parishioners.
Tapping into a long tradition that can be traced back to Augustine, Michael Pasquarello explores a theological definition of beauty that has tremendous revelatory power in a post-Christendom world. A church manifesting this beauty is not merely a gathering of people, but a place where God’s new creation appears in the midst of the old creation, ushered in by a pastor willing to make God the primary actor within the doxological craft of preaching.
Michael Pasquarello III is Methodist Chair of Divinity, director of the Robert Smith Jr. Preaching Institute, and director of the Doctor of Ministry program at Beeson Divinity School. His other books include Sacred Rhetoric: Preaching as a Theological and Pastoral Practice of the Church and We Speak Because We Have First Been Spoken: A Grammar of the Preaching Life.