Beauty as Witness
Before we can defend the faith, we must show that it is good. That it is beautiful.
A Manifesto for a Faith Worth Living
Beauty as Witness: A New Apologetic
The world does not need more arguments. It needs more wonder.
What we call "apologetics" has often become a defensive posture—proofs, propositions, preemptive answers to questions no one is asking. But what if the most powerful form of witness isn’t argument at all?
What if it’s awe?
Beauty does not demand belief. It invites it. It beckons the soul into alignment with something it already knows but has forgotten. This is why I speak of beauty as witness. Because long before someone accepts a truth, they must feel that it is good. That it is worth wanting.
This is not a retreat from intellectual rigor. It is a recovery of presence. Beauty is rigorous. It demands attention. It sharpens the mind while stirring the soul. But it does so through enchantment—not enforcement.
This is what I mean by a new apologetic:
Not cultural defense.
Not ideological reaction.
But faithful presence.
Attentive living.
Aesthetic coherence.
A quiet rebellion of beauty in a world that no longer knows what it means to see.
In this, I follow not the typical apologist, but C.S. Lewis—not merely for his logic, but for his light. Lewis lived what I call poetic apologetics. He didn’t argue people into the Kingdom—he wrote them into longing. His brilliance was not in the clarity of his syllogisms, but in the sacramental shimmer of his prose. He was a poet disguised as a don.
And in a world starved for presence, I believe we need fewer defenders—and more artists. Fewer arguments—and more lives so saturated with beauty and meaning that they become their own apologetic.
That’s what this page is about. That’s what this work is for.
“Before we can defend the faith, we must show that it is good. That it is beautiful.”
— Timothy Willard
Theology of Awe
The beginning of belief is not logic. It is wonder.
Long before we reason our way to faith, something stirs. A stillness. A haunting. A radiant moment in the everyday that makes us pause—and see. That is awe. And awe is theological.
Awe is what Otto called the mysterium tremendum. What Hopkins called the grandeur of God. What Lewis called joy—that stab of longing for something beyond the reach of words. It is not proof, but presence. Not a syllogism, but a shimmer.
Awe awakens belief not by instructing the mind, but by arresting the soul. It arrests us not with volume, but with depth. And this is why awe is the true beginning of any apologetic worth building—because it meets the human person not where they argue, but where they ache.
In my work, I return again and again to this idea: that beauty does not persuade in the way we’ve been taught to expect. It does not insist. It doesn’t even explain. It reveals. And then it waits. Because beauty, like God, is patient.
This is the shape of what I call a theology of awe:
It trusts the slow formation of the soul
It sees wonder as a form of wisdom
It treats presence as apologetic, and silence as sacred
We live in an age of spectacle and noise. But awe is quiet. It slips past argument and reaches the deep places. And it is there, in that stillness, that belief begins—not as certainty, but as recognition.
“God speaks to us through beauty. But in order to hear the words, we must slow down and listen with our hearts..”
— Timothy D. Willard, The Beauty Chasers
Reframing Lewis: The Apologist of Beauty
C.S. Lewis is often remembered for his arguments. But it is his beauty that endures.
Long before he was a defender of doctrine, he was a lover of longing. Before he was a Christian, he was pierced by Northernness. And even after conversion, his deepest appeal was not to the mind, but to the imagination.
Lewis was not a philosopher in the strict sense—though he did study and teach philosophy. He was a poetic theologian—a mythmaker of meaning. He translated truth into atmosphere. He took the abstract and gave it breath. This is why I call him the Apologist of Beauty.
His apologetics were not adversarial. They were luminous. He didn’t argue his readers into faith—he awakened their memory of it. His writings do not force belief; they make belief possible. Not by logic alone, but by light.
In Lewis, beauty becomes theology’s native language. Not a tool of persuasion, but a presence that names what cannot be reduced. Joy, as he described it, was not the object of desire, but the signal of it. It was the echo of a music too beautiful to forget.
This is the legacy I seek to continue—not to defend faith in the modern sense, but to illuminate it. To let longing do the work of awakening. To build atmospheres of meaning where belief becomes imaginable again.
Creative Resistance
To speak of beauty in a disenchanted world is an act of rebellion.
We live in an age that rewards speed, spectacle, and cynicism. In such a climate, to live slowly, attentively, and beautifully is not merely a lifestyle choice. It is a form of resistance.
Creative resistance is not about reacting to culture. It is about cultivating a different atmosphere within it. Beauty does not shout; it lingers. It does not demand attention; it commands it through quiet excellence, through careful presence, through the long obedience of craft.
To practice beauty in this moment is to defy the forces that flatten meaning. It is to name what matters. To make space for the sacred in ordinary things.
This is the role of artists, writers, mothers, teachers, pastors, and poets. We are not here to argue our way to influence. We are here to plant seeds of awe in a culture of efficiency. To make the world more inhabitable through wonder.
Creative resistance looks like a beautifully set table. A well-written sentence. A walk in the woods without a phone. A church service shaped by reverence. A poem read aloud at bedtime. These are not small things. They are the subversive practices of people who believe that eternity can still be tasted here.
In a world bent toward speed and scarcity, the beautiful life whispers another story. A better story. One worth waiting for.
The Beautiful Life
If beauty is a form of witness, then living beautifully is its truest expression.
The beautiful life is not an aesthetic. It’s a posture. It begins with awe and ends in presence. It is shaped not by platform but by intimacy, not by persuasion but by coherence. It is a life that reveals what it loves by how it loves.
To live beautifully is to reject the utilitarian logic of our age. It is to recover slowness, to steward attention, to savor the sacramental rhythms of the everyday. The beautiful life keeps the soul porous to wonder and the body rooted in place.
Beauty becomes a kind of liturgy—one made of table settings and candlelight, of storytelling and shared silence, of poetry remembered and prayers whispered in kitchens and car rides. It is not about performance. It is about presence.
The beautiful life is the ultimate apologetic not because it proves something, but because it awakens someone. It is not crafted for argument. It is offered as an invitation. To behold. To believe. To belong.
In the end, beauty bears witness not just to what is true—but to what is possible.
Current Projects.
C.S. Lewis and the Idea of the North – A monograph exploring the metaphysical resonance of Lewis’s Northern landscapes and the imaginative atmosphere of longing.
The Apologist of Beauty – A longform essay and forthcoming academic monograph exploring a new model of cultural apologetics grounded in beauty, imagination, and craft—moving beyond rational defense toward wonder as faithful witness.
Northern Light: Jane Eyre and the Aesthetics of the North – A literary monograph exploring Brontë’s metaphysical landscapes and their role in awakening longing, atmosphere, and theological imagination.
Lux: The Anatomy of Hope – A theological meditation on the beauty of Christian hope, cosmology, and spiritual formation in an age of despair.
The Great Conversation – An introduction to philosophy for young readers, tracing the story of the great thinkers and ideas that have shaped our world.
The Apologist of Beauty – A long-form essay and academic monograph reframing cultural apologetics through beauty, imagination, and craft—moving beyond rational defense toward wonder as a faithful witness.
Formation Through Presence – A new work-in-progress exploring the slow habits of living beautifully in a fractured age
Public talks, Substack essays, and courses in poetic apologetics, beauty as resistance, and wonder as formation.
Further Explorations
Keynote: Wonder & Wisdom in an Age of Distraction
[Watch my Charlotte Mason plenary →]Marveling: An Online Course in Wonder, Awe & the Beautiful Life
[Learn more →]
Lectures & Teaching
“Use Your Tools” and “The Scandal of Beauty in Our Culture” – Charlotte Mason Institute National Conference, Asbruy University & Seminary
“The Return of Beauty in a Profane World” – Encountering Beauty Conference, Museum of the Bible
“Beauty as Spiritual Formation” – Reformed Theological Seminary
“Theology, Beauty, and Creativity” - DMin Cohort Lecturer, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary