to render glory unto the Father…

image credit: NLM

“We are reminded of the urgent need for a renewed dialogue between aesthetics and ethics, between beauty, truth and goodness”, the Pope writes, “not only by contemporary cultural and artistic debate, but also by daily reality. In fact, at various levels, there is a dramatically-evident split … between the two dimensions: that of the search for beauty – understood however in reductive terms as exterior form, as an appearance to be pursued at all costs – and that of the truth and goodness of actions undertaken to achieve certain ends.

“Indeed”, he adds, “searching for a beauty that is foreign to or separate from the human search for truth and goodness would become (as unfortunately happens) mere asceticism and, especially for the very young, a path leading to ephemeral values and to banal and superficial appearances, even a flight into an artificial paradise that masks inner emptiness“. [article source]