Hello and welcome to Speaking with Joy, a podcast about books, beauty, and music.

So make yourself a cup of tea, sit down, and let's begin.

Okay. down and let's begin. Well, hello, friends, and welcome back to a brand new season of Speaking with Joy.

I'm so excited to kick this season off by sharing with all of you the recordings from my

events this summer, the live speaking with joy

events where we talked about why beauty matters in a broken world. Now, we had a few problems

with the recordings, so I don't have the live recordings of our music because for some reason

my singing mic didn't pick up a track. So instead, I've edited in bits with our studio

tracks. So in this, you'll hear our talks from the evenings, and then I've edited in Jules and

my music with the appropriate songs for the appropriate talks. I hope that you all enjoy listening

to this, and I look so forward to welcoming you back with a brand new episode next week.

But for now, sit back, relax, and enjoy speaking with joy live. So tonight we are here to talk about why beauty matters in a broken world. And to begin

that conversation, I want to tell you about a summer afternoon in my 15th year. Now, like

many houses in Colorado, we don't have air conditioning. And one summer, I couldn't drive. I

was full of angst because I was a teenager, and that's what it is to be a teenager. And my room was on the very top floor, and so it was roasting, it was an oven. So one day, I went to the basement where Joel was gone doing some adult thing, as he was very much, seemed like an adult to me in my 15-year-old years. And so I went down to his basement

room. And there in the quiet and cold, I had some piece, and I started flipping through his

CDs. And in that, there was one album by Sufian Stevens. Do we have any Sufian Stevens listeners?

At least two of you. So Sufian Stevens is this very

artistic, angsty person. And there's this one song called the Casimir Poluski Day. And it is about,

it's from the perspective of a young man who loves a girl who is dying. And it's about the summer

that they spend together.

And all through the song, there is this tension between the beauty and the love and the depth

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