You're listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender.

This week, Dan sits down for a conversation with his friend, Dr. John Cunningham,

who recently completed a dissertation on the aesthetics of beauty in the theology of Jonathan Edwards.

Dan and John discussed the idea that God is the very

embodiment of beauty and that our engagement with beauty can draw us deeper into the heart

of God.

I'm with John Cunningham, dear friend from decades and John recently, congratulations. Thank you. Got his doctorate from University of Virginia.

And what we're going to talk about today is really in many ways the work of his very profound

dissertation, hopefully with clear enough categories that we as a broader audience will have a

chance to comprehend what does the aesthetics of Jonathan Edwards mean for our day-to-day life.

So, John, thank you so much for being with me.

Thank you.

Jump into that question.

Sure. So, you know, I think most of us have read Jonathan Edwards along the line somewhere at the hands of angry English teachers

and having sort of pictured as, oh, a hellfire and brimstone revival preacher.

And he could be that, unfortunately, but everybody in that era was.

He was a product of his times.

But those who don't know him well won't know that he talked about beauty more than almost anything else,

beauty, heaven, than he talked about any other subject.

But also, more than any other subject, but also more than

any other thinker in history, he estimated the value of beauty as a theological idea, more

highly than von Baltazar, more highly than St. Augustine. So a profound thinker on beauty.

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