Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living

by Krista Tippett

I begin to wonder if beauty is somehow as elemental to life as carbon and chlorophyll—a key component that imparts life and hope and even transcendence to the natural world and to the religious and the nonreligious of the human species. Might beauty be a bridge we can walk across occasionally to each other, a bridge that might help humble and save us? To insist on beauty in physical spaces where we go to learn and to play and to work and to heal is, we are now learning, to make all of these pursuits more fulsome and life-giving. To attend to the beauty in the other is to redirect the trap of “charity” and “development” in the century now past—to become unable to define and reduce other human beings as problems to help and to solve. The social venture entrepreneur Jacqueline Novogratz, who works in some of the poorest places in the world, asks a question wherever she goes that she experiences to call forth inner abundance: what are you doing when you feel most beautiful?

On beauty as a virtue.