Folks, welcome to another edition of Socrates in the studio.

Socrates in the studio means there's no audience.

So if you hear people laughing, it's your imagination.

It's my privilege to have, as my guest, someone I've interviewed before, but not in the Socrates format. Margarita,

Mooney Suarez. Margarita, welcome.

Thank you, Eric. It's great to be here.

Well, it's great to talk to you about anything, but particularly about what we're going to talk about today.

You've put together a book called The Wounds of Beauty, The Wounds of Beauty,

Seven Dialogues on Art and Education.

Often Christians bandy about the phrase,

the good, the true, and the beautiful.

But they rarely talk about the beautiful and beauty.

So I want to ask the larger question,

what does truth have to do with beauty?

What does beauty have to do with the good and the true?

But as we get to all that, why don't I start with you and ask you, Margarita,

how did you find your way into writing about these things? This book really emerged out of the

COVID crisis. When suddenly classes at Princeton Theological Seminary were

shut down, I had been reading C.S. Lewis's book, The Weight of Glory. It's a series of essays,

of orations. And one of my favorite quotes from Lewis is, I'm going to paraphrase him here,

if humans had postponed the search for beauty until we had perfect safety and

security, the search never would have begun. And so... Now, I just, in case people don't know,

...