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Episode 33: Beauty: What Is It and Why Does It Matter? with Dr. John Mark Miravalle
79 Plays4 years ago
Dr. John-Mark Miravalle received his pontifical doctorate from the Regina Apostolorum in Rome, and is an associate professor of moral and systematic theology at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, MD. He is the author of numerous books, including the one we discussed called Beauty: What it is and Why it Matters. His debates with noted atheists on the topics of God’s Existence, Theistic Morality, and Same-sex marriage are available on Youtube. He and his wife have six children.
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Beauty: What It Is and Why It Matters by Dr. John Miravalle
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Transcript
Introduction to Root Like Faith Podcast
00:00:07
Speaker
Well, hi, my name is Patrick Schwank and I am so thankful that you are listening in with me today at Root Like Faith. It is our deepest desire to encourage and equip men and women to be rooted in God's word, transformed by the love of Jesus and moved by his mission in the power of the Holy Spirit. Nothing is more important. Well, today I'm excited because we have another special guest. He's the author of a book that I read about a year ago that had a real impact on my life. And I can't wait to share with you today's episode and introduce you to our guests. So let's get started.
Who is Dr. John Mark Miravelli?
00:00:39
Speaker
Well, my guest today is Dr. John Mark Miravelli. Dr. Miravelli received his pontifical doctorate from the Regina Apostleorum in Rome and his associate professor of moral and systematic theology at Mount St. Mary's Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland. He is the author of several books, including one in particular we'll be discussing today called Beauty, What It Is and Why It Matters. His debate with noted atheists on the topics of God's existence, theistic morality, and same-sex marriage,
00:01:07
Speaker
are available on YouTube, and he and his wife have six children.
Impact of 'Beauty, What It Is and Why It Matters'
00:01:10
Speaker
John Mark, welcome to Root Like Faith. Thanks so much, Pat. Thanks for having me. Well, I'm excited to talk with you today and for our listeners to
00:01:18
Speaker
To hear more about your book, as we were talking before we started recording this, I was listening to an interview by you here in Ann Arbor. I was headed to the store and was listening to the radio and heard an interview where you were talking about your book that I think was just out at the time. Again, it's called Beauty, What It Is and Why It Matters. I was so struck by the interview that I literally pulled my car over.
00:01:44
Speaker
and jotted down your name and jotted down the name of the book so that I could order it later. And that's what I did. I ordered it and began reading it. And it has been such a good book. And I thoroughly enjoyed it. And as we were talking before, I've recommended it to numerous people over the last year. And so again, thank you for the book. I think one of the things that really struck me
00:02:07
Speaker
as I was reading. I had friends in the past that would talk about beauty, and we're going to be talking about the role of beauty and how God uses beauty in the life of a believer and just what beauty does in us and how that is used by God for our own transformation or spiritual formation. But I had friends in the past that talked about beauty, and I don't know that I understood it. And so I think that when I read your book, it was like the light bulb went on for me.
00:02:35
Speaker
also discovered that really this idea of beauty, this topic is something that has been talked about and discussed in church history for a long time. I mean, there's just a really deep, you know, history here, tradition here with great minds that have thought about and talked about the role of beauty that I honestly was pretty oblivious to.
What is Beauty?
00:02:55
Speaker
And so as we get started today, you just talk about what is beauty. I mean, when we talk about that idea, what is beauty and why does it matter?
00:03:04
Speaker
Well, there's about as many definitions of beauty as there are philosophers of beauty. So this is just my little effort to try to sort of synthesize the tradition, particularly the Christian tradition. But my little effort to summarize the nature of beauty is to say it's a combination of order and surprise. So order is when something is the way it's supposed to be. It conforms to its nature. And surprise is when we realize that this is still not obvious.
00:03:35
Speaker
surprises when our mind is grabbed by something that is fresh, that is new, that is not necessary. So the best example I can come up with just on a day-to-day basis is when your kid takes their first steps, that's beautiful. Why? Well, it's orderly because kids are supposed to walk. Humans are supposed to walk. That conforms to our nature as human beings. And yet somehow, somehow you're never ready for it when your kid walks, when your kid smiles the first time, when your kid
00:04:04
Speaker
says the first word, it blows you away, right? And you call your spouse. He walked. He took his first step. And they said, well, yeah, what'd you expect? It was, you know, they're a human being, right? Humans walk. Yeah, I know, but I can't even believe it. I'm just so amazed. That's beauty. It's when we are amazed at things being the way they should be. Yeah, that's really good. You know, I think about after I read your book, and again, like you're saying, you talk about the idea of beauty being both orderly and surprising, and then
00:04:34
Speaker
I mean, that's built into the way things are. It's built into creation that you see that at the very beginning of the Scriptures, Genesis 1, Genesis 2. And then in so many ways, then art mimics creation. Am I describing that correctly? Yeah, exactly. So I would say that order expresses intelligence and surprise expresses freedom. So order shows that something has been organized by something thinking.
00:05:02
Speaker
And the fact that something is surprising or not necessary shows that freedom is also at work. So the way God builds the world expresses his intelligence and his freedom, and that's really clear in Genesis 1. And then the way we sort of approach our lives and particularly manufacture pieces of beauty, of what we call fine art, is also expressing our nature as images of God, that is, as intelligent and free beings.
Beauty and Spiritual Transformation
00:05:28
Speaker
So it really,
00:05:29
Speaker
connects us to our origins in the divine. Yeah, and I know we're going to get to this, but you mentioned creation, you mentioned natural beauty, and of course the fine arts. You think about how that gets flushed out and whether it's a narrative, a story, or a movie, or music. You just see that then in all different forms of beauty or artistic expression.
00:05:55
Speaker
I think for most people, natural beauty or creation is probably the easiest example of this or what you're describing. It's sort of the one that we've all sort of stood at the base of a mountain or on the shore of the ocean and felt small or we've been sort of in awe of God's power or his strength. But how does then God use beauty really to
00:06:22
Speaker
to change us or to bring about virtue or to transform us. Yeah, so I would say, again, the first thing which you see, of course, all through the Psalms and through the Christian tradition is God uses the beauty of nature to communicate with us, right? I mean, it's his first work of art and we see his hand, right? And again, like I said, the believers have always honed in on this. And actually, you know, it's really interesting that science comes out of the Judeo-Christian world because
00:06:53
Speaker
What science needs to believe is that the universe is orderly. Otherwise, why would you try bothering to understand it? But you also have to believe that the order of the universe is in a sense gratuitous. It doesn't have to be exactly this way, which is why you have to go out and do experiments. You can't just sit down with pen and paper and figure out the way the natural world is.
00:07:13
Speaker
All that's to say that everything that we relate to, every way we relate to nature presupposes God. And if you don't have that presupposition, so for instance, one of the guys I debated, he's an atheist and he sort of in a sense refuses to see the
00:07:32
Speaker
intelligence and freedom behind the natural world and because of that he loses not just the connection to God but even the appreciation of the beauty of nature. It's like going to a great painting and refusing to see anything but the chemical properties in the paint, refusing to see the meaning. So that would be the first thing and we'll talk a little bit maybe more at the end about how I believe nature is the bedrock level of opening oneself up
00:08:02
Speaker
to the divine peace and delight that it was designed to give us. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's so good. I know in the book, you make the point that we were made for beauty. What do you mean
Humans and the Pursuit of Beauty
00:08:16
Speaker
by that? I mean, just sort of explain what you mean by that, and how does that look then in the Christian life? So a couple points. One is, by saying we were made for beauty, it's similar to saying that we were made for truth and goodness.
00:08:32
Speaker
One way of understanding the human soul is by its faculties. So we have an intellect. Well, that was made to know being, to know reality and ultimately to know God. And when we know reality, that's called truth. So our minds were made for truth. Our will is the next faculty and that's made to choose the true and to choose reality insofar as it's fulfilling and the ultimately fulfilling reality is God. So we were made for truth. We were made for goodness.
00:09:00
Speaker
But we don't just have intellect and will, we also have this thing called feelings, this faculty called passions or appetites or emotions. And we were made to engage the ultimate realities with our feelings too. We were made to delight, for instance, in God. And that's what beauty does, is beauty allows our feelings to delight in spiritual and ultimately divine reality. So we weren't just made to engage God with our mind, we weren't just made to engage God
00:09:29
Speaker
with our will. We were made to engage God and the goodness that He has created with our feelings. And that's what beauty allows, because that surprise factor allows us to thrill the surprising goodness of God and what He has done. Yeah, I think you talk about in the book, in this, I believe, is a quote from your book, that beauty draws a person towards immaterial truth and goodness. Yeah. So beauty makes us long for higher things, which motivates us to pursue higher things.
00:10:03
Speaker
We can delight in what is below us, which is fine, or we can delight in what is above us, which is better and more crucial. And beauty is what allows that to happen. Beauty is where we see the spiritual coming in through material manifestations, and we delight in it. Yeah. But let me move on along
Living a Christian Life with Order and Surprise
00:10:24
Speaker
those same lines where you talk about, again, beauty being both orderly and surprising.
00:10:24
Speaker
which leads to our ultimate fulfillment. That's right.
00:10:30
Speaker
But briefly describe what you mean, in particular, how that relates to the Christian life. I know we were talking earlier about, there's a section in the book, I think it's on page 35, where you talk about that idea in sort of expanding upon a quote by G.K. Chesterton, where he says, keep the commandments, but break the conventions. Yeah. So talk about that a little bit, because I loved that. I mean, I loved the whole book, but that section there,
00:10:59
Speaker
was so powerful to me, this idea that beauty has a role in us, it transforms us, it changes us. But talk about that in particular, if you will. Yeah, absolutely. So let me talk about two things. First that, and then I'll talk about what to avoid. So when we use the faculties of the soul to pursue their proper object, which is ultimately God and godly things,
00:11:24
Speaker
we become more like them, right? So, pursuing discipleship with Christ, we become more like Christ, etc. So, what does it mean to pursue beauty and to become more like beauty? Well, if beauty is orderly and surprising, then presumably we should become more orderly and surprising. And the best formula I ever found is from, as you say, Chesterton, for what does a person look like? What is the strategy for living in an orderly and surprising way?
00:11:54
Speaker
He says, well, keep the commandments. If you keep the commandments, that guarantees that your lives will correspond to your nature as God made you. And that means you will be orderly. You'll do and be the sort of person you're supposed to be and do the things you're supposed to do. Keep the commandments. It's really like the rich young man, right? Jesus first says, do the orderly things, keep the commandments, and now do something surprising.
00:12:19
Speaker
And doing something surprising means to break the conventions. It means to not be governed by any expectations other than those of the commandments. And that's what makes the saints so wonderful. And Chesterton points this out. I mean, how do you have saints that are so different, so radically different, and yet who are all alike in that they keep the commandments? You never know what a saint is going to do next.
00:12:46
Speaker
even though they're always living out the baseline commandments. So it's always orderly, it's always surprising. And I do think Christians should make a checklist on both those and say, what am I doing? How do I need to keep the commandments better? Yeah, good. How do I need to break the conventions more? How is my thinking and my lifestyle become banal and boring and typical?
00:13:16
Speaker
and unexciting, because we're supposed to live exciting lives of holiness. Yeah. That's so good. I mean, I just loved that whole section in a book. And gosh, I just think about the day we're living in. I mean, that's relevant for any time throughout history. Like you're saying, you look back at the saints throughout church history.
00:13:34
Speaker
and the different ways they lived beautiful lives. And I think about just sort of what's going on in our culture and what an appropriate time for that type of a. So that's the second point. Absolutely. I think so. What for me, for me, just writing the book or researching the most powerful thing was seeing the enemies of beauty.
00:13:53
Speaker
So order without surprise is being cliche, boring, thoughtless, dull, repetitive. It's repeating the creed every Sunday and never thinking about what it means or trying to find new insights. So you don't want to be banal and routine and mechanical. And you also don't want to be surprising without order because that's pleasure and disorder. Now, I would say that many people, including many Christians, live their life vacillating,
00:14:22
Speaker
between banality and disorder. So what do they do? They drive to work at a job that they find no meaning in, that they find dull and repetitive and pointless. And then they drive home and they Netflix binge watching some disordered reality show or maybe porn or some other really dysfunctional, violent, who knows what all. So our entertainment is all disordered and our work is all banal, cliche and boring.
00:14:48
Speaker
So I really think Satan has us right now particularly enslaved to the enemies of beauty.
Enemies of Beauty: Banality and Disorder
00:14:56
Speaker
Yeah. And breaking those bonds, I think is going to be very important for a lot of Christians. Yeah. Yep. That's so, so true. So, so good. I just, you think about the idea of like just how attractive the Christian life is or can be, um, you know, when it's lived out, I just think about,
00:15:13
Speaker
you know, in a short time that we've lived, you know, for example, I'm just real practically in the neighborhood that we're living in, you know, we moved to Ann Arbor to start a church and in just the different ways that as followers of Jesus, you can live like you're saying orderly, you keep the commandments, you walk after Jesus, who's the way and the truth and the life, but yet,
00:15:32
Speaker
how unconventional the life of Jesus is and can be, and then how attractive that can be to a culture that desperately needs to encounter God and to know God. And so just think about the many ways that we can live that orderly but also surprising life that is beautiful and compelling and attractive.
00:15:55
Speaker
Yeah. I was going to mention, I think it was in the last year, maybe sometime in January, February, I wrote, or I read the book called Deep Conversion, Deep Prayer, a book you're probably familiar with. I haven't read it, but I have heard of it and I know it's very well received. Yeah, it's an excellent book. And in the book, Dubé talks about, if I'm saying his name correctly, he quotes another author
00:16:22
Speaker
and essentially saying that truth is symphonic. And I love that. He goes on to talk about how, you know, he uses the illustration of, you know, going to, you know, a symphony and the conductor and the musicians are all, you know, playing according to that original score. And when that's happening, when all of the musicians and the conductor are following the original score, you know, the experience of that is pleasurable. It's delight. It's beautiful.
00:16:52
Speaker
if a musician decides to do his or her own thing, it becomes pretty ugly in a moment. And you no longer have beauty, you have noise, you have chaos. And he's essentially making the point that as is true for music, so it's true in the moral life or the Christian life. And I just thought that's a great illustration. It is. And one of the things that has to be fought against is this really, I think, ridiculous idea that disorder
00:17:22
Speaker
or brokenness is actually somehow more profound than goodness and beauty. And again, Chesterton's very good. I mean, this is, in a sense, one of his missions is to make people surprised at things working right. He said, look, every time the train reaches the right stop,
00:17:39
Speaker
It should amaze us, because it could have gone to any stop. It could have wound up anywhere. Anytime you hit the right note, when there's so many wrong notes to hit, peace should be surprising. When everything works out right, it should astonish us. And it's so easy to make things go wrong, right? And especially, I would say teenagers are particularly susceptible to the lie that
00:18:08
Speaker
cynicism, disorder, disenfranchisement, that these somehow measure or indicate a kind of profundity of outlook. They don't. It's so easy. Any hack poet can write a convincing description of hell, but maybe only two or three in history have written a convincing description of heaven. Because beauty, things working right, is hard.
00:18:37
Speaker
it's elegant, it's sophisticated, and it's mature. And indulging in brokenness is actually just juvenile. And that's something I think that largely the art world has forgotten. And that's why we Christians need to bring it back because Christians, Christians, because of the combination of Calvary and the resurrection, Christians
00:19:02
Speaker
do happy endings and surprise happy endings like no one can. I love that. When you're talking about that, it reminds me of, I think, where you might even be in the introduction of your book. Again, you quote Chesterton and that great line where you cannot tidy anything without untighting yourself, which I love that. I mean, explain that.
00:19:28
Speaker
get to some really practical ways somebody can pursue beauty just in their life or as a parent. How do you cultivate beauty in your home or in your child's life? But before that, explain that, because I loved that quote. I've shared that with other people. And it's kind of what you're talking about. It's hard work to pursue truth and goodness and beauty. And you get messy in the process. That's right. And you have to prioritize the type of beauty you're going to pursue. There are lots of kinds of beauties.
00:19:56
Speaker
One type of beauty is an orderly and surprising interior to your home. The fact that we have a lot of kids means we're not going to be pursuing that. That's for sure. And I don't know about you, but I know a lot of fathers and husbands, they really have a hard time coming home to a messy house. I mean, they really revolve from it and that's okay. Like in a sense, that just means they're looking for beauty and they're not finding it. It's a bummer.
00:20:26
Speaker
The way I make sense of it in my life is to say, well, actually, right now our house is our palette and the kids are the paintings that we're trying to perfect into masterpieces. And while you're making a painting, you don't worry about keeping the palette clean. And so, too, in the Christian life and certainly in family life, you have to say, look, there's all kinds of beauty and the supreme one is the moral beauty of sanctity.
00:20:53
Speaker
We're going to prioritize that and we're going to use physical and artistic beauty to the extent that it facilitates that process. But that's not an end in itself. And so I would say that in terms of if you're pursuing one kind of beauty, you're going to often have to sacrifice another kind. And so getting the priority straight before you begin that process is going to be real important.
00:21:17
Speaker
That's excellent. Let me ask you one last question that really relates to, I think, just some practical examples of how somebody pursues beauty.
Cultivating Beauty in Christian Life
00:21:28
Speaker
You kind of touched on it with that last response. But just as I think about those that are listening, whether they're a college student at the University of Michigan, or maybe a mom who's home with her kids, or a family with kids that are growing,
00:21:46
Speaker
you know, the single person that is in their 30s, 40s, 50s that's listening, like what does it look like for somebody to begin pursuing beauty, cultivating beauty? Like how does that look very practically in the life of a Christian? Yeah, that's a great question. And I'll give just two suggestions. But before I give those two suggestions, let me pull back and talk about the two virtues that you need primarily for beauty. So the first virtue you need is you need fortitude. You need
00:22:16
Speaker
the willingness to sacrifice and to strive to persevere in cultivating an appreciation of beauty because as we just said beauty beauty is not as easy as either disorder or banality beauty is hard it's hard to keep that combination of things working the way they're supposed to and yet being astonished at the rightness of it that's tough so that requires a lot of perseverance which means you're going to have to
00:22:41
Speaker
discipline yourself to do this, to pursue it. And I'll talk about one way to do that. Well, actually, I'll talk about it now. So the first resolution that it will take some fortitude to carry through on is because nature is the elemental form of beauty in the world that is accessible to human beings, I would recommend at least every Sunday
00:23:11
Speaker
For 15 minutes, get a hot drink and go outside and be still. Just be still and appreciate the goodness of what God has made. The order and the surprise in your backyard or at a park or whatever. So that would be my first recommendation. Develop that discipline of appreciating beauty. Because if you can't appreciate God's beauty, whose beauty can you appreciate? That's point one. Point two is the other thing you need for beauty is you need self-restraint.
00:23:41
Speaker
Because if you indulge in wild stuff all the time and if you overstimulate your eyes and your ears, then it will make it that much harder to be surprised. Just like if you're eating, let's take your favorite meal. If you eat it every single day for a month, you won't be surprised at it anymore because you've exercised no restraint.
00:24:06
Speaker
So we have to exercise more restraint with our eyes and ears. So here's my other suggestion, a suggestion for temperance. This is the negative side of cultivating beauty. I would recommend that on Friday, on the day of the Lord's Passion, people make a resolution to not watch any video, not on their phone, not on their computer, not on their TV. Go a day without watching artificially sped up experience.
00:24:35
Speaker
so that you can more slowly appreciate the natural rhythm of the beauty that God's established. So those two, 15 minutes a day on Sunday in nature, in quiet, and every Friday no video. See what happens. Yeah, that's great. One of the things I think that was so profound for me when I read your book,
00:24:59
Speaker
I had been diagnosed with a type of blood cancer back in January of 2018, which I know hadn't really talked about that before.
Personal Reflection on Beauty
00:25:07
Speaker
And it wasn't long after that. I think I was post-transplant. I had two stem cell transplants at the University of Michigan in 2000. Yeah, I guess it was July and October of 2018. It wasn't long after that. I think I came across your book. And I think what was interesting for me during that time is I read that.
00:25:28
Speaker
And, you know, I began to go outside and part of my recovery, part of getting better again, was just going out and walking. And in the combination of that discipline of just going out and walking and, you know, we live in Michigan, there's lots of trees, it's a beautiful state. And just what you had shared, I mean, some of those things in the book and some of the things you've just talked about, ministered to my soul in a way that I hadn't experienced before.
00:25:56
Speaker
And boy, what a, I mean, if the church, I mean, the church offers an awful lot to the world, to the culture, but especially like you're saying, and just sort of a hyperactive, busy, distracted culture. I mean, one of the greatest gifts that the church can offer the world, you know, right now is that undistracted life, that reflective life of,
00:26:21
Speaker
simply, for example, taking a walk and meditating on the power of God, the goodness of God. And that, for me, had such a profound impact on me as I was going through recovery. And so I just to share another sort of example of what you're talking about, that habit, that rhythm, and how God can use that. Very, very much. So Aquinas, you know, he distinguishes a lot of different types of feelings.
00:26:46
Speaker
And one of them is pleasure, right? And pleasure sort of has a negative connotation in today's society. It can suggest a hedonistic pleasure, something like that. But actually he says pleasure or delight, we'll call it delight. He says delight is actually the supreme passion because every other feeling is going to motivate you to do something. But delight actually says, no, things are good here. Let's stop a while. And of course, delight is what we're promised in heaven.
00:27:16
Speaker
And delight, delight therefore has this connotation with rest. If you can't rest, you can't have delight. Now, God has ordered us. It's amazing. We won't be happy unless God orders us. So he says, listen, at least one day of the week, I want you to rest. Because without that, you cannot take delight. The discipline of beauty is the discipline of delight. And I think Sundays are a particular opportunity for all Christians to pursue that.
00:27:46
Speaker
That's great.
How to Cultivate Beauty at Home
00:27:47
Speaker
Let me just sort of, I know I already said this is the last question, but a long, this is sort of a sub-question of the last question. You're a parent of six kids. We have four. Our kids are now 18, 16, 13, and 11. Wow. So along those same lines of what you're talking about, we were kind of talking about really how do you help, how do you cultivate beauty in your own life and what does that look like? And you shared several just great examples.
00:28:17
Speaker
But talk now is apparent. I know a lot of our listeners are parents and they've got young kids or kids that are maybe teenagers. And so what does that look like within your own home or family? Like I just think about, you know, again, the culture we're living in where, you know, you're constantly fighting. How much time do they get on social media or in front of a TV or playing video games? There's all those kinds of distractions that exist today for a parent.
00:28:46
Speaker
that didn't exist, at least not to the same degree when maybe we were that age. And so what does it look like for a parent with young kids or teenage-age kids to really begin cultivating beauty or pursuing beauty, whether that's in entertainment or reading? I don't know if I'm asking that question the right way, but let me just throw that out there. Yeah, excellent question. Again, I don't really have anything too original, but I can just share what's been helpful for us.
00:29:15
Speaker
So again, the one is it's a constant battle against the screens. Again, indulgence in overstimulation of the senses makes it impossible to appreciate beauty. I'm going to say that again. Indulgence in overstimulation of the senses makes it impossible to appreciate beauty because you can no longer be surprised. So I know it's a fight. I would just say,
00:29:43
Speaker
on the negative level, keep fighting that fight, because they need help developing that type of restraint. And then on the positive side, yeah, I just think so. I mean, I have a bit of a music background. We do a lot of music as a family, do a lot of instruments. But probably more basically, shutting down all the TVs and reading novels. I mean, my wife and I, it's the only form of beauty that we can sort of
00:30:11
Speaker
all come together and experience together. And again, I know this is not original. A lot of people recommend that, but there are so many gorgeous stories. I've had so many great experiences. It is amazing when I shut a book and none of my kids talks or moves through one. That's an amazing thing. They are resting in the beauty. It's an amazing thing. So I do recommend finding beautiful, good stories.
00:30:37
Speaker
to read as a family. Is it hard? Yes. Do the older kids fight against it? Of course. But boy, the payoff is like nothing else for our for our family. Yeah, that's great. I would just second that I know our kids. Fortunately, our kids love to read. And we've kind of encouraged that, you know, as they were younger, and they've just sort of carried that now into their teenage years, and we'll go to bed and just read. And we've done
00:31:01
Speaker
That is a family as well, and I've had other friends say that every child should learn an instrument, and I love that. I think some of our kids have not yet learned an instrument, but several of our kids have those kinds of things that you're talking about that are so good for a child in terms of cultivating the right kinds of longings and affections and are pointing a child's heart to truth, to goodness, and to beauty.
00:31:27
Speaker
And so just love those examples. Well, thank you again for this conversation. Again, I want to personally thank you for the book. And again, there's still parts of that. I'm trying to get my mind around and I just have loved it and appreciate it. It's been something that the Lord has used in my own life as I was sharing just in so many different ways over the last year, year and a half as I went through cancer treatment. And I know our listeners are going to greatly benefit from our conversation today. So thank you so much for your time and your expertise.
00:31:57
Speaker
Thank you so much, Pat. Praise God. I mean, I tell you, you do a project like this, it's kind of on a whim, and then, you know, the Lord, the Lord does, you know, stuff, and I really appreciate your, your testimony to his work. Yeah, I'm glad you persevered in it. As always, you can go to our show notes on rootlikefaith.com forward slash podcast. We'll provide a full bio for Dr.
Conclusion and Farewell
00:32:20
Speaker
Miravelli's
00:32:21
Speaker
different writings and also where you can follow him on YouTube as well as info on the book that we've been talking about, Beauty, What It Is, and Why It Matters. And then you can also follow us on Instagram at Patrick W. Schwenk and at Ruth Schwenk or on Facebook. And as if I don't say it enough already, we are thrilled that you are joining us and we welcome you into our family here at Root Like Faith. And so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcast so you don't miss an episode.