Lucid, Simple Beauty

In today’s first “On the Square” article, David Hart reflects on the reality of holiness and the places we find it. “The wonderful thing about holiness, when you really encounter it, is that it testifies to itself,” he writes in The Abbot and Aunt Susie .

This is not to say one can never be deceived; it’s easy to mistake personal charisma for genuine grace, or to be misled by plausible charlatans—until, that is, one comes across the real thing, at a moment when one is open to it. Then one knows it for what it is: a quality of such lucid and incandescent simplicity and of such moral beauty that one feels simultaneously deeply happy in its presence and ashamed of one’s own failure to have realized it within oneself.

Aunt Susie was one such incandescent witness to him.

Also appearing this week:

• R. R. Reno’s Art and Human Flourishing
• James Kerian’s Charity By the Sword
• Joe Carter’s The Fountainhead of Bedford Falls
• George Weigel’s Paint-By-Numbers Journalism
• Elizabeth Scalia’s Rationing Bono and Other Gaia-Saving Ideas
• David Mills’ I Was Ignorant, and You Taught Me