Beholding Beauty explores the powerful ways painting, poetry, music, and drama embody the creativity of the Original Artist, the triune God.

Following God’s instructions, Samuel chose David, Jesse’s youngest son—an unimpressive shepherd boy who would become one of Israel’s greatest warriors, poets and kings, and by far the most famous. Like much of Saʿdī’s verse, the Gulistān was originally written for Saʿdī’s main patrons, the Salghurid Atabaks of Fars, who were absorbed through a mixture of political alliances and coercion into the Mongol Ilkhanate during the second half of the thirteenth century. We were made to spend every day of our lives admiring the glorious beauty of our God as it is revealed in Christ Jesus. Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry, published in Brill Studies in Middle Eastern Literatures. These photographs might not all be very good, but they mean something to me and in that they are beautiful.We are living in an epoch of the greatest cultural exchange the world has ever known and have much to learn from each other.

In our society that’s so obsessed with productivity, it may seem like David had his priorities wrong. In a prayer that at first glance sounds a bit “soft” for a warrior, David asked to see God’s beauty: “One thing I ask from the Lord, this only do I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple” (Psalm 27:4). It is an imaginary story about the sort of things we know Our Lord actually did do, and is based around the people He may well have met and befriended, and the places He visited. Second, that Sa’di believes that beauty can transform us from a lower to a higher state, from mud to a rose. The second volume to the Beholding Beauty series sets out to discover the ancient traditions of body adornment and beautification of Central Asia, where the ‘East’ and ‘West’ have converged, and where great civilisations of the past have fused to create the societies and cultures today.

The fifth volume documents the astonishing array of beauty and adornment practices spanning the vastly unique cultures of the Sahel, ‘the Shore’ of West Africa. Beholding Beauty is a multi-media campaign operating within Amonbê, a non-profit organisation, based in Monaco. While the science of awe is still emerging, marvelling at God’s majesty as demonstrated in His creation is an ancient spiritual practice.

It is not that I would not be friends with someone based on appearance, but as usually one's personality is apparent through presentation to others, I judge on that. Extensive footnotes address a multitude of related topics, like parallels with Troubadour poetry, the development of early Sufism and the interplay between Philosophy and Theology in the Middle Ages. The European Enlightenment relished Sheikh Sa‘di of Shiraz, 13th-century Persian poet and moral philosopher for his work, The Rose Garden, a witty mixture of prose and poetry, morality and ribaldry, lyric and proverbial wisdom.

Perhaps the language of Dante does not lend itself to the verbal somersaults that post-Lacanian English does.

This month-long trip had so many different aspects of beauty that I photographed over a roll of film a day.Please list any fees and grants from, employment by, consultancy for, shared ownership in or any close relationship with, at any time over the preceding 36 months, any organisation whose interests may be affected by the publication of the response. At the back of the book there are excerpts from Scripture describing how Jesus healed a man born blind, and also the second miraculous catch of fish. Beholding Beauty encompasses all corners of the globe, collecting stories, indigenous cosmetic practices and plant-derived recipes from rural women living at the world’s ancient crossroads, cultural melting pots that have produced an astonishing spectrum of beauty over the years that have also witnessed the trade of luxury products, ideas and spiritual worldview for millennia.