Episode 24: Beauty

La Bonne Vie

The wait is over! Season 2 kicks off with Deacon Conque and Kyle continuing to get transcendental in this final installment from our series on the transcendentals. Join us as we contemplate transcendental beauty.

Show Notes and Outline of Topics

Quote from Pope St. John Paul the Great, Address during Vigil of Prayer at 15th World Youth Day, August 19, 2000

"It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle."

1. What is beauty?

ּ• the importance of ideas in the life of the mind

• real experience of beauty is a conversion to reality

• unity, truth, and goodness allows us to possess being, but beauty is about us being possessed by being

• beauty is profoundly Eucharistic

• aesthetic beauty vs. ontological beauty

• St. Thomas Aquinas and beauty: beauty is that which, when contemplated, delights

• What does it mean to delight in something?

• the problem with social media: tempts us to share an experience of beauty before ever having the experience of beauty

2. Encountering Beauty

• beauty, longing, and pain

• beauty, recreation, and entertainment

• being entertained by the show Friends is ugly

• the danger in allowing our kids to be entertained by things that are not beauty

• the importance of letting beautiful things order us

• the conversion from entertainment to recreation

• Seinfeld as the antithesis of Friends: a world that punishes sin and vice as opposed to being rewarded for sin and vice

• *Word Check: Kyle mentions how something beautiful harmonizes with reality as opposed to being dissident with reality. In using dissident, he really meant dissonant but made a verbal faux pas. A dissident is a person who is disagreeing or dissenting in opinion or attitude. Something is dissonant when it is out of harmony, incongruous, disagreeing or harsh in sound, or music characterized by dissonance.

3. Getting Real about Sin and Beauty

• We should care about what we are entertained by.

• An Examen: Is what we are drawn to good for us, beautiful, rooted in truth, unifying? Temperance: How much time do I spend being entertained?

• things are ordering us; what are we being ordered by?

• In the Home: How do we spend time as family

• We are not helpless with regard to our preferences. Our desires are shaped by growth in beauty.

• If we order eating to health, can we ever enjoy boudin balls in an ordered way?

• Albarado's argument for the beauty and nobility of boudin balls

• The Lord's invitation: Come and see. Or, come and become someone who sees. This is the encounter of beauty.

• beauty, seeing God, and purity of heart

• temperance frees us from addiction to goods so that we can be free to enter into the ontological beauty

La Bonne Vie is a podcast offering from John Paul the Great Academy dedicated to discussing the joys, triumphs, struggles, and issues with boldly living out our Catholic, classical mission in Acadiana through vibrant family lives.

Our theme music, "Vive La Bonne Vie," is by L'Angelus.