The Christian mystery, celebrated in the Roman Catholic liturgy, is a sensible mystery, and calls out for artistic expression. Living Beauty explores the Christian mystery and points to the need for a liturgical aesthetic as a means to encounter the divine mystery. A liturgical aesthetic gives an account of Christian worship in terms of a new set of categories that includes divine beauty, a theology of sensibility, and the new notion of a unitive revelatory experience. These categories help to reveal the aesthetic dimensions of the Church's watershed document on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium. The Church today stands in need of a new conversation on the aesthetic dimension of the liturgy and the role of the arts. Contrary to common opinion, the arts provide more than an environment or mere extrinsic ornamentation for the liturgy; they are intrinsic to the very nature of liturgy. They provide the means of being sanctified in the encounter with divine beauty that is the mystery of Christian worship. Artistic expression enables the worshiping community to receive the divine mystery in beauty.

"Readers will find this book helpful and challenging, whatever their particular involvement in the liturgy may be. While it will be edifying to the individual, the book's theses are, like its very structure, essentially dialogic, dramatic and community-oriented; I suspect it would be particularly fruitful in group discussions. Although it is written from a Roman Catholic perspective, Living Beauty will speak to any tradition, with direct applications to Anglican and many Protestant liturgies. While some parts of the book may be somewhat dense for the non-specialist, overall the book is accessible to the educated general reader." - Cithara