Spotlight Saturday #5

I give my end-of-week post to other authors and bloggers whose work is worth noting. There are so many excellent articles out there, so many good poems and stories that I want to use my online space, once a week, to send all of you to read something you might otherwise miss. To see last week’s episode, click here.

Let this redirect you, like an open door to a view that’s worth seeing. The selected post may be old, but it’s new to me, and it’s beauty still rings true.

This week’s spotlight is “Rape and the Christian University, Part Two” by Matthew A. Moser, from the blog “Christ and University.” The original post is rather long, but in it, Mr. Moser looks at ways rape can be prevented. Instead of directing women to change how they dressed, though, he offered insights on how to change our reaction to the beautiful, addressing the would-be or could-be rapist rather than the victim.

He writes, “Enjoy and appreciate the good and the beautiful, I say, but do so as a way of praising God. When you enjoy the beauty of another person, remember God. Make sure your “Daaaaaaay-aaaaaam!” is followed by “Praise be to God.” Such is a distinctly Christian way of seeing the world and, I think, it goes a long way in shaping our desires for the truth, the beautiful, and the good.”

This got me thinking about our responses, in general, to beautiful things. Instead of making our reaction us-centric, where we see something admirable and immediately think “How can we enjoy that better?” or “How can we get our hands on that?” or even, “How can we emulate that in our own art?,” our first response should be God-centric: “Thank you for making a world where such beauty exists and for making such beauty possible.”

Enjoy!

Copyright 2015 Andrea Lundgren
Photo by GaborfromHungary, Creative Commons