“The Christian believes that humankind can know truth—that is the way things really are—through the Bible and other ways, [including] Truth in the book of nature. In the North Carolina mountains I saw God communicate through creation; as one twelfth-century saint wrote: “For this whole visible world is a book written by the finger of God.”

In preparing to write That Beauty May Flourish, I jotted quickly things that came to mind when I thought of beauty. When I think of beauty, I think of people and sound and scenes and objects; I think of physical beauty and beautiful experiences.

From my notes, some of the things God has allowed me to see and experience: The captivating beauty of my wife; my daughters being born; Vancouver with snow on the mountains behind it; Half Dome from the air; Seattle from Puget Sound; the fjords near Oslo from an Olympic ski jump; Colorado mountains from the top of Aspen Highlands; the wildflowers and aspen tress in the mountains near Salt Lake City; the farmland and Cayuga Lake from the hills south of Ithaca, New York; my wife and children sitting around the table on the deck happy and engaged in conversation; one million plus men singing praise to God in the 1997 Promise Keepers Stand in the Gap; children in a group home rescued from the 40-below-zero abandonment in the streets of Darhan, Mongolia; Ugandan children rescued from rebels dancing for us; the children of a wonderful Kenyan orphanage lined up by their bunks singing “It’s OK” for us; biking the hills of Baja Mexico alongside the Pacific Ocean; driving on the Pacific Coastal Highway between Santa Barbara and San Francisco Bay in a convertible with The Messiah blaring; the waters of Trunk Bay on St. Johns; fishing for bass in the shallows of Lake Michigan by Mackinaw Island; a village near Baku, Mali that was verdant in the midst of utterly barren land of the Sahel because of water wells that had been dug by Christians.

Beautiful.