Beauty Will Save the World

Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity

By: Brian Zahnd

Narrated by: David Cochran Heath

Length: 6 hrs and 59 mins

Publisher's summary

In today’s world we have technology, convenience, security, and a measure of prosperity, but where is the beauty?

For thousands of years, artists, sages, philosophers, and theologians have connected the beautiful and the sacred and identified art with our longing for God. Now we live in a day when convenience and practicality have largely displaced beauty as a value. The church is no exception. Even salvation is commonly viewed in a scientific and mechanistic manner and presented as a plan, system, or formula.

In Beauty Will Save the World, Brian Zahnd presents the argument that this loss of beauty as a principal value has been disastrous for Western culture, and especially for the church. The full message of the beauty of the Gospel has been replaced by our desires to satisfy our material needs, to empirically prove our faith, and to establish political power in our world - the exact same things that Christ was tempted with and rejected in the wilderness. Zahnd shows that by following the teachings of the Beatitudes, the church can become a viable alternative to current-day political, commercial, and religious power and can actually achieve what these powers promise to provide but fail to deliver. Using stories from the life of St. Francis of Assisi and from his own life, he teaches us to stay on the journey to discover the kingdom of God in a fuller, richer, more beautiful, way.

©2018 eChristian (P)2018 eChristian

Beautiful and thought provoking

This book is exactly what we need right now. It challenges so much that is simply taken for granted as “Christian” but is not at all Christ-like about the church today.

top notch book!

I love this book. Definitely one of the best books I read in a long time. probably in my top three. beauty will save the world is an excellent treatise on the attractiveness of suffering love in the Christian church. only downside is that it fails to explain how this is work out between believers, as well as it explains how suffering love attracts unbelievers. deeply relevant today!

Truly beautiful!

As an artist and Jesus follower, this will be a book to which I will reference often to inform my art.

Beauty

How we see the world shapes our perception of it...know God is the ultimate beauty helps us to see His creation, even though fallen is still beautiful... with of course humanity being the most beautiful of all!!

Amazing book!

I listened to this in a few days. It is so compelling, sincere, well written and well narrated. No wasted words. Highly recommend !!

Christ-centric theology of beauty

A powerful and much needed message, rediscovering the tradition of beauty as a way to know truth. Much needed, especially in American evangelicalism, which is the main target audience.

A must read for every Christian

It’s stirring, riveting, beautiful and attractive. This is what Christianity should sound like. Brian, so eloquently expresses the beauty of Christ and how we enter into such beauty.

Beautiful

This is a great dive into what has been missing in the modern evangelical scene. The true church will be those that begin to see things in this light and act as such. I pray that more Christians develop a deeper thirst for the kind of truth discussed in this book, and reject the contemporary (yet age old) ways.

Wonderful audiobook

He was telling the truth but the audio is too long, sometimes drove me to sleep.

Very disappointing

This book sounded amazing. It starts out really interesting and presents a clever and compelling perspective about a much needed reawakening in Christianity. However within a few chapters this book becomes a heady and preachy critique. The optimism wanes into almost the very apologetic and intellectual approach that it’s trying to escape.
I’m amazed at how many “shoulds” and “we must” seem to be used, rather than kindness and uplifting exhortation. The book merely retells the basic gospel that any Bible reading believer has heard hundreds of times, but in a way that makes us feel not enough and what we’ve supposedly missed.
The sad irony is that as much as the author calls for beauty and poetry in the beginning, the later chapters lack any poetic flourish or even hope or encouragement.
It’s pretty simple, God is love, if we can’t share love joy and peace through our writing in a beautiful way, then we miss out in the beauty that this book claims will save the world. Sadly this book does exactly that… it misses it, falling into intellectual criticism while denouncing smug Christianity. Incredibly ironic.
I couldn’t even finish that last chapters.