Hello, everyone, and welcome to Speaking with Joy, a podcast to fill your soul, challenge your mind, and make you brave.

I'm your host, Joy Clarkson, and an evangelist for all things good, true, and beautiful.

So make yourself a cup of tea, find somewhere comfortable, and let's dive in to this week's episode. Our situation today shows that beauty

demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not

allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with

herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name

as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past, whether he admits it or not,

can no longer pray, and soon will no longer be able to love. Hans Erz von Baldassar, seeing the form.

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Speaking with Joy. I hope you all had a very happy Easter this past week

and that you remember that it is still Easter, so I hope you're still in the celebratory mood.

Where I am, spring has finally decided to arrive. It's not being quite so tentative. So I enjoyed a very

beautiful and gloriously sunny Easter Day with family.

And it really does feel like we have turned from winter towards spring and that is such a

welcome thing. I'm so excited to share this week's episode with you all.

One of the things that I have tried to do with this

podcast and that I would like to do more in the future is podcasts focusing on a figure who I think

is important in the history of theology, art, or culture. So in the past, we've done an episode

on specifically on Dante. And for my own personal sense of importance, I've done

one on Rich Mullins. But today I'm excited to explore a figure who is immensely important,

but perhaps less known, and that is Hans Erz von Baltazar. Baltazar was a Swiss theologian and Catholic priest, who was eventually appointed to be a cardinal

shortly before he died. And he's a hugely important figure in theology in the 20th century.

And specifically, with theology concerning beauty, so theological aesthetics, was kind of one of the great contributions

...