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

This week, Dan continues the conversation with Dr. John Cunningham by discussing how delight in and desire for beauty can shape the way we engage trauma and brokenness.

Well, I'm back with my friend John Cunningham and really a remarkable pastor who has been

pastoring in Charlottesville, Virginia for how many years?

12 years.

And during that time, worked assiduously on a dissertation on Jonathan Edwards and his view of aesthetics,

or at least to say how his view of beauty shaped so much of his theological import. So I've got John back for a second opportunity, and I wanted to return to this whole

question of, how do we look at one of the ugliest events of the world, the murder of God,

the murder of Jesus? And to think of that, within that framework, it is the most a beautiful

event that the angels have ever observed.

I think this will allow us to begin to take the category of beauty into how we look at brokenness in our world, how we look at our own suffering and our own scars.

So take us back into that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I think a couple of things on that. Beauty critically, to not be reduced to an

effete sentimentalism has got to account for the ugliness of the world. And if beauty is to become

something that that informs our own spirituality, it has to be able to attend to ugly broken that informs our own spirituality.

It has to be able to attend to ugly brokenness in our own lives.

Which is my complaint over a lot of Christian art.

That it has, in one sense, validated the resurrection without acknowledging the reality of the cross.

Just pole vaulting from creation to the new world without going through the cross.

And certainly not something that Edwards did or that I think a healthy ascetic that he might be able to help us with would do.

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