You’ve heard that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Perhaps this saying rings true because beauty is so very complex, no one knows quite how to define it. Beauty is hard to nail down, so we turn to definition by committee, where every voice gets a say and every idea is included. The cobbled mess we end with is devoid of anything resembling beauty’s essence.

Because our definition is lacking, we chase our meager, cloudy definitions of beauty, doing so with every fiber of our being. This is our heart’s desire. We want loving relationships, rewarding careers, meaningful tasks, and endless delights—all good things, yes, but beauty is not just this. Beauty is more than this. But what is it? In “The Taste of Strawberries: Tolkien’s Imagination of the Good,” Jeffrey Bilbro points us to the good work of J. R. R. Tolkien for some answers. Bilbro challenges us to return beauty to its full glory, to give up the thin definitions we’ve settled for—to make beauty “exciting and attractive and not bland.”

To that end, James Hoskins then laments over our pursuit of beauty in “A Cure for Beauty” he asks: “How can we live beautiful lives when we are so broken and trapped by our own greed, addictions, compulsive self-preservation, and tendency toward idolatry? How can we live a beautiful life when our existence seems absurd a lot of the time?” Again, it is our skewed definition of beauty that traps us. Our broken hands can’t keep hold of beauty the way God intended. Still, these fragments and fractures reflect beauty’s true essence. These are gifts from our Creator God, breadcrumbs that will one day, lead us all the way home, to the Beautiful One Himself.

—Erin Straza, Editor

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