Enjoying God's Beauty: Hymnody and Justice

God's beauty is omnipresent, particularly in the Scriptures, in the liturgy, and in human friendship. In Enjoying God's Beauty, Father Navone discusses how to find God in the beauty of the world and in all of God's creation.

The joy of seeing the beauty of God in our lives - the eye of love" that is Christian faith and "the look of love" that is Christian contemplation beholding the Beloved in all things - is at the heart of Christian life. In Enjoying God's Beauty, Father Navone provides an overview of the Christian experience of God's beauty in all things.

Enjoying God's Beauty focuses on three approaches to the Christian experience of beauty. The first approach to enjoying God's beauty follows the assumption that wherever there is Christian life, there is Christian Vision and action. The second approach revolves around the Church's Scriptures. Father Navone focuses on the Church's invitation to contemplate in its scriptural iconography true images of God, ourselves, and the world. The third approach involves our experience of life in the Church. Father Navone focuses on the theologies of beauty of Thomas Aquinas and Jonathan Edwards based on their experience within the community of Christian faith. Finally, he examines the healing and integrating Spirit of God's love within the Church and the world and how it invites reflection on the universal scope of Beauty Itself (God).

Just as there is no joy without love, there is no contemplation without beauty. In Enjoying God's Beauty, Father Navone shows that the power of beauty moves us to gaze with love upon the Beloved, an act in the Christian faith better known as contemplation.

Chapters are "Windows on Beauty," *In a Glass Darkly, - *Beauty Begets Beauty, - *Time to Enjoy, - *To Enjoy Is to Glorify, - *The Look of Love, - *The 'Beautiful' Shepherd, - *Scriptural Icons, - *Sight to the Blind, - *Predestined for Glory, - *Edwards and Aquinas, - *Beauty in Liturgy, - and *Radiant Spirit. -

John Navone, SJ, is Professor of Theology at the Gregorian University in Rome and at the Gonzaga University summer school. He has written three other books published by Liturgical Press: Toward a Theology of Beauty, Seeking God in Story, and Self-Giving and Sharing: The Trinity and Human Fulfillment.