Author’s note: Last weekend, I attended the Creative Arts Collective for Christian Life and Faith Summit at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, alongside my husband, Joel, who is an artist. Today’s blog reflects my thoughts and notes from the summit.
“Beauty will save the world.”
This is a line that has lingered in my mind lately—surfacing again and again over the past few weeks in talks I’ve heard and in social media posts, novels, and essays I’ve read–surfacing in a way that seems to be begging for my attention. Fyodor Dostoevsky penned the words in The Idiot in 1868–a line spoken by Prince Myshkin, a character known by a sort of disarming innocence and moral clarity. It’s a bold claim, almost naïve at first glance. Beauty will save us? In a world that often looks ugly, feels harsh, and bombards us with grotesque and chaotic AI-generated images, it’s hard to see beauty.
And yet, I can’t quite shake the idea of beauty saving us.
The idea itself is intriguing to me, maybe because of the life I’ve (often with bemused wonder) found myself living. Being married to an artist and raising daughters who see the world through a creative lens has slowly reshaped how I see, understand, and experience beauty. Over the years, I have learned that beauty isn’t simply something decorative or pleasant, but is something alive—something that moves, inspires, challenges, disarms, and sometimes even heals.
Still, “beauty will save us” feels like more than an appreciation for art or aesthetics; it feels like more than simply looking at something we find pretty. The idea that beauty will save us suggests something deeper: that beauty has power. The beauty that has the ability to save us and change us is not superficial beauty, not perfection, but the kind that reveals truth, evokes compassion, and draws us out of ourselves.
The idea of beauty saving us begs the question: what kind of beauty could actually save anything?
Perhaps it’s the beauty that interrupts us. The kind of beauty that makes us pause in the middle of noise and distraction:
A piece of music that quiets the chaos in your head.
A painting that forces you to feel something you’ve been avoiding.
A moment of unexpected kindness that restores a bit of your faith in people.
A sunrise. A sunset.
Tulips.
Lake Michigan at any time of year.
A novel that challenges you to consider another point of view.
These are small things, but they’re not insignificant. They shift something internally—and maybe that’s where change begins. Because the truth is that to be changed by these small glimpses of beauty, we have to be moving slowly enough, be present enough, to notice them. We have to be paying attention beyond, or through, the noise. We have to see more than the chaos that is constantly screaming for our attention. Taking the time to notice beauty takes a different type of looking–of seeing.
There’s also a moral dimension to beauty that often gets overlooked. We recognize beauty in acts of courage, in selflessness, in forgiveness. When someone chooses grace over resentment, or truth over convenience, there’s a kind of beauty there that feels just as real as anything you’d find in a gallery. Maybe even more so. It reminds us of what humanity can be at its best.
*Author’s interruption: To the family who graciously paid for dinner for three young women in prom dresses in Fennville, Michigan (one of whom was my daughter) this last Friday, I want to say, thank you, thank you, thank you. You gave me a glimpse of beauty in the humanity of others and bestowed a sweet, sacred gift upon them. Thank you.
And then there’s spiritual beauty—the kind that connects us to something beyond ourselves. Whether through nature, silence, or moments of transcendence, it has a way of reordering our priorities. It humbles us. It expands us. It makes the world feel both larger and more meaningful at the same time. Because in the beginning, God created.
In the beginning God created. And in the beginning, God created humans in God’s own image. This means that humans are inherently creative (and beautiful) because we are created by God in God’s image.
So maybe Dostoevsky wasn’t being naïve after all. Maybe he was pointing to something we’re in danger of forgetting.
Beauty doesn’t save the world in one sweeping, cinematic moment. It doesn’t erase suffering or magically fix what’s broken. But it does something quieter and, perhaps, more enduring: it changes people. And changed people—people who are more attentive, more compassionate, more alive to what matters—are the ones who shape the world. And, I have to believe, shape the world for the better.
If beauty saves anything, maybe it saves us from indifference. From numbness. From losing sight of what is good and true. Maybe it even saves us from the chaos.
And in a time when it’s easy to become hardened or cynical, that kind of salvation feels worth holding onto.
*Author’s final note: I’m really looking forward to reading How Beauty Will Save the World: Recovering the Power of the Arts for the Christian Life by Winfield Bevins (2026). In this book, Bevins writes about how beauty can heal lives, renew the church, and revive our hope.
9 Responses
Thank you Kathryn, for this “beautiful”, so well written reminder of the power in beauty. Your framing it in interruptions, moral and spiritual shows the depth of the possibilities in changing people to me. May it be so. Slow me down Lord!
Yes, yes! Beauty does save us in the sense of being restored, made whole, set right from despair, ailment or dysfunction. How else can we describe what happens when we are engaged by something in nature or the arts and are filled with wonder or jolted into healthy disturbance? I believe it’s the collective experience of beauty that makes flash mobs such a great experience. Thank you for reminding us that beauty is a vital part of the human experience.
So much truth and good in this essay. Thank you.
Thanks, Kathy. I discovered this Dostoevsky line a few years ago when I immersed myself in Dorothy Day– her life, faith, writings and influence. This line from Dostoevsky was a favorite of hers, energizing all the big little things she did. When her granddaughter wrote Dorothy’s biography, she gave it this title: Beauty will Save the World.
This is beautiful and thoughts we need to cling to!
Some of us old-timers will remember this verse–“What a wondrous time is spring, when all the trees are budding. The birds begin to sing, the flowers start their blooming. That’s how it is with God’s love, once you’ve experienced it–you want to sing, it’s fresh like spring, you want to PASS IT ON.”
I’ve been singing that verse this spring, even yesterday on the way to church, seeing the beauty of the trees, the color, the shape, the size. So it is with God’s people–it was the elderly Hilda who tottered to the front to read Scripture and Pray, beautifully.
Such an apt verse that is – thank you, Ron!
What a gorgeous reminder and invitation to wake up to, Kathy. Thank you. I needed this today, this invitation to presence, to pause and to notice the beauty in this moment. To believe beauty can change people and shape the world because it changes me. Yes.
Wonderful piece. One of my goals as an artist and flower gardener is to help make the word a better and more peaceful place. There is something therapeutic in a bouquet of fresh cuts for the giver and receiver.