The Longing for Beauty in Our Age of Anxiety | Dr. Daniel McInerny

Christendom College Lectures

Dr. McInerny delivered a talk in the final installment of the Beato Fra Angelica Fine Arts events entitled: “The Longing for Beauty in Our Age of Anxiety”. The talk discussed “the transcendent nature of beauty and the desperate need of our anxious, attention-fractured culture to experience this transcendence. As well as how more and more our culture is defined by the metaphor of the machine and the power associated with the machine. And what’s ironic is that, while the machine is of our own making and its power is something we desire, we at the same time feel a desperate sense of unease and anxiety over the thing we have wrought. Like Victor Frankenstein, we feel haunted and entrapped by the creature we have made. Thus in our culture we are in great need of that which will enable us to transcend and overcome our own menacing mechanisms. Grace, of course, is the most important source of transcendence, but natural, artistic, and moral beauty are key sources of transcendence as well.”