Dear Reader,

In this issue, we set out to address a somewhat thorny question: how should we, as Christians, relate to things? To possessions? To wealth? In the Acts of the Apostles, many people responded to their conversion to Christianity by selling all of their belongings and giving the proceeds to the poor. On the other hand, when Jesus was anointed with a whole bottle of expensive perfume, he called this apparently wasteful act, “a beautiful thing.”

Personally, I often turn to the thinking of William Morris, who, though he was an agnostic, held both the world and human beings in such high esteem that his view of reality approached the sacramental. The founder of the Arts & Crafts Movement, Morris was an artist and craftsman but also an ardent socialist, devoting his final years to championing a collectivist economic vision. But the things Morris made throughout his life were meant for individual people. “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful,” he famously said, and of course this injunction implies that you have your own house and the freedom to fill it with the things you choose.

It may at first seem impossible to reconcile these halves of Morris’s life, but Morris believed that you, as a human being, are worth being surrounded by beautiful things—often things that echoed the beauties of the natural world, but nonetheless things made by human hands, for human uses. Certainly he regretted that beautiful, handmade things did not fill the majority of British homes, and he railed against the inequalities and injustices that meant that many of his fellow countrymen lived in squalor and hardship. But he did not regret that the things he and his partners created were made one by one and destined to be enjoyed by one family or household at a time. His socialism called not for the flattening of the human experience, but for the universalization of abundance. Morris wanted there to be enough beauty for all.

In this issue, Sharon Rajadurai writes toward a Christian philanthropy characterized by a free flow of resources from the most powerful to the least. Matthew Beringer, following Augustine, asserts the goodness of all things, yet asks what benefits we might derive from disconnecting from our devices and machines. And Jordan Parro examines the mystery behind the long tradition of icons in Christian worship.

One of my favorite things that Morris wrote sums up his ambitions, while acknowledging their limitations: “I determined to do no less than to transform the world with Beauty. If I have succeeded in some small way, if only in one small corner of the world, amongst the men and women I love, then I shall count myself blessed, and blessed, and blessed, and the work goes on.” To love things in right proportion requires wisdom and discernment, as the writers who contributed to this issue show. Nonetheless, we are called to live in the midst of Beauty, and to invite our neighbors to do the same.

Fare Forward,

Sarah Clark