The Truth and Beauty (2022)

About the Book

Book: The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England’s Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

Author: Andrew Klaven

Genre: Non-Fiction; Literary Criticism, Religion & Christian Theology

Release Date: April 5, 2022

Follow Andrew Klavan to a deeper, richer understanding of the words of Jesus.

Andrew Klavan believed what he read in the Gospels, but he often struggled to understand what Jesus really meant. So he began a journey of wrestling with the beautiful and often strange words of Jesus.

He learned Greek in order to read the Gospels in their original languages, and he vowed to set aside any preconceptions about what the Scriptures say. But it wasn’t until he began exploring how some of history’s greatest writers wrestled with the same issues we confront today–political upheaval, rejection of social norms, growing disbelief in God–that he found a new way of understanding what Jesus meant.

In The Truth and Beauty, Klavan combines a decades-long writing career with a lifetime of reading to discover a fresh understanding of the Gospels. By reading the words of Jesus through the life and work of writers such as William Wordsworth and John Keats, Mary Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge–the English romantics–Klavan discovered a way to encounter Jesus in a deeper and more profound way than ever before.

For readers seeking to find renewed meaning in the words of Jesus–and for those who are striving for belief in a materialistic world–The Truth and Beauty offers an intimate account of one man’s struggle to understand the Gospels in all their strangeness, and so find his way to a life that is, as he says, “the most creative, the most joyful, and surely the most true.”

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My Thoughts

The Truth and Beauty by Andrew Klaven is my favorite book of 2022. I devoured this book in about a day and a half. I loved every single second reading this seriously well-written text. The Romantic period of history is one of my favorites to study. I love the poetry, the fiction, the art, and the history. In my humble opinion, if people would just research about this tumultuous time period and learn from the disastrous actions of the people of this time, Society would be in a much better place today. But I digress…back to the book. Andrew Klaven’s writing is superb. I love his turn of phrase. I love his sense of humor. I love his humility and honesty about how he has felt about some of the seemingly complicated words and actions of Jesus Christ. I love his insight into the Romantic time period. I really love how he breaks down Hamlet (not of the Romantic period, but a great foundational text to lay out his claims), Frankenstein, and the various stellar poems from the period. I learned great new perspectives and insights from which to see these beloved texts. I’m actually really excited about all I learned because I often teach Hamlet, Frankenstein, Romantic poetry, and the French Revolution to my AP English Lit and Comp students. Now I have new aspects to share with them. Again, I digress. In addition to all this amazing new understanding that I have received from reading this book, I have also gleaned new insight into Jesus’s words and actions in the Gospels. Klaven’s claims about Jesus’s words and actions in the Gospels are all the more interesting and thought-provoking when paired with his ideas in regards to the Romantic-era poets, novelists, and artists. I was so excited as I was reading this book that I had to stop every two to three pages and read whole passages to my husband so we could discuss back and forth the claims Klaven makes. It was SO much fun! All in all, The Truth and Beauty is definitely a text I will continue to think upon long into the future.

The Truth and Beauty is a phenomenal text. I highly, highly recommend this insightful read. If you are looking for a book that is well researched and well written, if you are looking for a read that will cause you to think about things in a different light, and/or if you just want a really good non-fiction text to escape into for a few hours, then I implore you to pick-up a copy of this book today. You will love it!

I purchased a copy of this novel in eBook form from Amazon.com on December 17, 2022, in order to review. In no way has this influenced my review. The opinions expressed in this review are my own.