Religious traditions hold the sacred to be beautiful and desecration to be ugly. Is this a glib, pious claim, masking a sentimental attachment to outdated categories? Or, is beauty still a guiding force in understanding what is valuable? Should our sense that an event or a person’s act is ugly guide our judgment?

Hans Urs von Balthasar, a twentieth-century theologian, developed a theology of beauty. He submitted that without an allegiance to beauty, along with her “sisters” truth and goodness, our lives would be fallow and loveless.