Book Review: How Beauty Will Save the World
Winfield Bevins. How Beauty Will Save the World: Recovering the Power of the Arts for the Christian Life. Nashville, TN: Oaks Press, 2025. 176 pp.
Meeting the Gaze of Christ
Six days a week, all throughout the year, tourists from around the world crowd together in a particular corner of the sprawling Musée du Louvre to get their glimpse (and selfie) of the famed Mona Lisa. Adjacent to the famous portrait is a vast tableau that most visitors ignore, the largest painting on display in the Louvre, a piece by Paolo Veronese entitled The Wedding at Cana. In it, Christ gazes out poignantly from a chaotic scene, surrounded by over a hundred other painted figures. Most of them are consumed by their own endeavors, ignoring Christ just like the modern museum-goers. And yet, he is there within their midst, inviting viewers to slow down and allow his beauty to move their spirits.
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Winfield Bevins shares this image and insight in his book, How Beauty Will Save the World: Recovering the Power of the Arts for the Christian Life. Veronese’s painting becomes something of an underlying theme throughout the book as Bevins explores the importance of art to the spiritual life. He combines insights from his personal journey as a ministry leader (he is an Anglican priest) and as a visual artist, with a call to action for all Christians—and particularly those in leadership positions—to join a growing artistic renaissance.
Overview of How Beauty Will Save the World
The book is a quick and easy read, with short chapters and clear parameters. These qualities, paired with reflection questions at the end, make the book an excellent resource for discussion in parishes or small groups. The conversational language also invites readers, as individuals, to slow down, connect with Bevins’s own journey, and consider the everyday beauty in their own lives.
The title originates from a famous line in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Bevins is careful to clarify that beauty itself is not salvific, but that God can use it to pique our hearts and lead us to the goodness and truth of the gospel. Bevins defines what he means by art (a broad swath of creative disciplines) and explores its importance to our spiritual health. With stories from his own journey and that of his friends and colleagues, Bevins shows how God uses beauty to draw people near and restore spiritual balance that can otherwise be warped by worldly temptations and concerns.
Restoring a Strained Relationship
This isn’t simply a call for individuals to engage more deeply in the arts. It is also a recalibration of the relationship between the church and artists. Bevins includes a brief foray into the movements within the Reformation that led some Christian traditions to abandon aesthetic beauty and to a broad redefinition of art that came with Modernist thought. These and other influences have left a legacy of misunderstanding and mistrust between many of today’s churches and artists. But because of God’s identity as Creator and first Artist, and our status as his beloved workmanship and image-bearers, Bevins argues that creativity is a hallmark of Christian living.
Bevins introduces the idea of the border-stalker, an individual with a foot in each world: the church and the artistic community. At the risk of misunderstanding and rejection from either side, these border-stalkers are nevertheless called to act as ambassadors to help heal this historic divide and usher in a new renaissance.
Equipping Missionaries of Beauty
If this all seems grand or theoretical, Bevins is here to help. He includes practical tips for ministers, parishes, and individuals to take small steps toward a richer engagement with the arts. In fact, at one point, he urges readers to set a timer right then and there, wherever their book-reading experience finds them, and try out Visio Divina, a form of visual prayer and meditation. He encourages pastors to consider commissioning works of art for use in worship (which can include written, visual, or musical works, for example) and turning unused space in their buildings into community art galleries. Anyone, he reminds readers, can curate their own artistic collection, no matter how small, by supporting local artists. It is easy to catch his vision and enthusiasm.
Bevins provides even more resources through links, downloads, and notes listed by chapter, as well as a “Liturgy for the Arts,” found in the back of the book
How Beauty Will Save the World is an important book. Despite the title, Bevins doesn’t spend much time specifying exactly how beauty will save the world. Rather, after sharing his own experiences, he commissions readers to discover the needs of their own local communities. “What if Christians were known as the most creative people in the world?” he asks. How could your own community be transformed by this vision? Go make it happen!
Concluding Thoughts
I propose two broad challenges facing many of us today that can be powerfully met through this commitment to faithful engagement with the arts. First, divisiveness. It’s everywhere, from national platforms to intimate family gatherings. Whether due to political differences or questions of church practices, divisions have grown deeper and sharper in recent memory. It is important to engage in difficult conversations with grace and courage, but in this book, I see a poignant reminder that arguing is not the only form of engagement.
Bevins teaches how the arts build bridges and break down dividing walls. They help us contemplate, create conversations, foster collaboration, and build community. In a world full of quagmires and nonstarters, the arts can offer a different way forward with the people in our lives who may be on the other side of a dividing line.
Second, the advent and rapid development of artificial intelligence have brought us to a moment when AI’s capabilities seem limitless. Machine learning can now produce aesthetically pleasing content. But art? True beauty? One of the most significant arguments of Bevins’s book is that human spirituality is important to art, and vice versa.
Those of us who believe that humans bear the image of God, that we create because of our connection to the Creator, must elevate and defend the importance of human creativity. AI can be a powerful tool with many uses, but I believe the world will grow thirsty for true beauty in the flood of AI-powered design. By answering Bevins’s call to promote and create art in our faith communities, we can become vessels of Christ’s living water to offer to this parched world.
“Let’s do something beautiful for God”
Winfield Bevins, How Beauty Will Save the World, pg. 153
Disclaimer: Author Winfield Bevins is a longtime contributor to Anglican Compass.
Image: How Beauty Will Save the World, © 2025 Oaks Press.
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