Beauty and Ethics: Why Philosophers Connect the Beautiful and the Good

Can beauty make us better people? Plato, C. S. Lewis, and Iris Murdoch offer three very different answers.

By Jill Szoo Wilson

“When he looks at Beauty in the only way that Beauty can be seen … it will become possible for him to give birth not to images of virtue, but to true virtue.”

— Plato, Symposium 212a, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff

More than two thousand years ago, Plato proposed a startling possibility: that beauty and virtue belong to the same journey of human perception. Ancient Greek philosophers rarely treated beauty as a matter of taste alone. Discussions of beauty frequently extended into questions of truth, character, education, and the good life because many thinkers suspected that beauty might reveal something significant about the nature of reality itself. From Plato’s dialogues to contemporary moral philosophy, the relationship between beauty and goodness has remained a subject of enduring debate. Does beauty disclose moral truth, shape moral perception, or belong to a different sphere of human experience altogether?

The persistence of this question reflects a tension that most people recognize instinctively. Experiences of beauty often feel meaningful in ways that exceed simple enjoyment. A landscape, a musical composition, a work of architecture, or even an act of extraordinary generosity can evoke a sense that we are encountering something valuable, something worthy of admiration or reverence. Yet beauty and goodness do not always appear together. History offers many examples of beautiful works, compelling ideas, and charismatic individuals associated with cruelty, injustice, or deception. These experiences point in different directions. One suggests that beauty reveals something important about what is good. The other suggests that beauty and goodness may be separate forms of value whose relationship remains uncertain.

Philosophers have responded to this tension in different ways. Some have argued that beauty leads human beings toward truth and virtue. Others have understood beauty as a sign of realities that transcend ordinary experience. Still others have located the significance of beauty in its ability to transform perception, teaching people to attend more carefully to the world and to one another. The present essay examines three influential responses to this question. Plato treats beauty as a pathway toward moral and metaphysical truth. C. S. Lewis understands beauty as an experience of longing that points beyond itself toward transcendent reality. Iris Murdoch, drawing upon insights from Simone Weil, argues that beauty cultivates the habits of attention through which ethical perception becomes possible. Although these thinkers arrive at different conclusions, each seeks to explain why beauty exerts such a powerful influence upon human life.

While philosophical traditions differ concerning the precise relationship between beauty and ethics, the most enduring accounts suggest that beauty serves as a movement beyond the self, awakening desire for transcendent value, deepening moral perception, and expanding human capacities for judgment, care, and understanding.

Beauty as a Pathway to the Good: The Platonic Paradigm

The classical foundation for connecting beauty and ethics appears in the philosophy of Plato. Writing in fourth-century BCE Athens, Plato lived in a culture that prized beauty in art, architecture, poetry, rhetoric, and athletic achievement. Yet his interest in beauty extended far beyond questions of artistic excellence or physical attractiveness. Plato believed that the visible world points toward deeper realities that cannot be grasped through the senses alone. Just as a mathematical truth remains true regardless of who discovers it, Plato believed that realities such as Justice, Truth, and Goodness possess an enduring existence independent of individual opinion. Beauty belonged to this same realm of ultimate reality.

This conviction shapes Plato’s treatment of beauty in The Symposium, a philosophical dialogue organized around a banquet conversation concerning the nature of love. The dialogue culminates in a speech attributed to Diotima, a wise woman who teaches Socrates that love is fundamentally a desire for what is good, beautiful, and enduring. Human beings often begin by admiring particular beautiful things: a face, a body, a work of art, or a beautiful landscape. Yet Diotima argues that genuine philosophical growth requires moving beyond attachment to any single object of admiration. Beauty becomes the starting point of an intellectual and spiritual ascent.

Through what later scholars would call the “ladder of love,” the lover gradually learns to recognize beauty in broader and more profound forms. Admiration for one beautiful body gives way to an appreciation for beauty wherever it appears. Physical beauty leads to admiration for beautiful souls, noble actions, just institutions, and forms of knowledge. Each stage expands perception and draws the individual beyond private desire toward larger and more enduring realities. The journey culminates in the apprehension of what Plato calls Beauty itself: beauty that remains constant, unchanging, and complete, rather than appearing only in particular objects or experiences.

The language of Beauty itself can feel abstract to modern readers. Yet the intuition behind Plato’s argument remains surprisingly familiar. Consider a young man newly in love. At first, his attention rests upon a particular person. Yet before long, beauty seems to appear everywhere. He notices the first flowers of spring, the color of the evening sky, a piece of music that expresses what he struggles to say in words. He searches for beautiful songs to share with the beloved and seeks beautiful places in which to spend time together. The experience suggests that the beauty he recognizes in one person somehow participates in and even bears witness to a larger reality. Diotima’s ladder of love begins from this intuition. The lover starts with admiration for a particular instance of beauty and gradually learns to recognize beauty wherever it appears.

“Suddenly he will catch sight of a beauty amazing in its nature.”

— Plato, Symposium 210e

For Plato, this moment represents far more than an aesthetic experience. The encounter with Beauty itself transforms the way a person understands every other form of beauty. Individual beautiful things become reflections of a deeper reality. Beauty therefore functions as a guide that leads the soul toward wisdom and participation in what Plato calls the Good. Ethical development follows from this process because the pursuit of beauty gradually reshapes what a person values. The individual begins to value what is lasting over what is fleeting, what is true over what merely appears attractive, and what contributes to human flourishing over what serves immediate appetite.

The Platonic account establishes one of the strongest connections between beauty and ethics in the history of philosophy. Beauty matters because it reveals something true about the structure of reality itself. The beautiful and the good participate in the same order of being, making the pursuit of beauty inseparable from the pursuit of wisdom and virtue. Although later philosophers would challenge Plato’s confidence in objective beauty and metaphysical truth, his influence remains profound. Nearly every subsequent discussion of beauty and ethics unfolds in conversation with the possibility he first articulated: that the experience of beauty may guide human beings toward a deeper understanding of what is ultimately good.

Beauty as Longing for Transcendence: The Lewisian Paradigm

While Plato understood beauty as a pathway toward virtue and ultimate reality, C. S. Lewis approached the question through the phenomenon of longing. Writing in the twentieth century, Lewis inherited both the Christian tradition and centuries of philosophical reflection on beauty. Yet his account begins less with metaphysical speculation than with a recurring human experience. Throughout his life, Lewis found himself haunted by moments of beauty that seemed to awaken a desire no earthly object could satisfy. Understanding that desire became one of the central projects of his intellectual and spiritual life.

Lewis did not arrive at his conclusions through abstract speculation alone. Throughout childhood and adolescence, he experienced moments in which beauty awakened a longing that seemed larger than the object that inspired it. In his autobiography Surprised by Joy, he describes encounters with literature, mythology, music, and the natural world that left him with a sense of desire both intense and elusive. Images from Norse mythology, distant landscapes glimpsed in books, and passages of poetry would suddenly fill him with what he later called Joy. The experience arrived unexpectedly, lingered for a moment, and then vanished, leaving behind a longing for something he could neither possess nor fully explain. These experiences eventually led Lewis to ask a question that would shape much of his mature thought: Why do certain experiences of beauty awaken desires that nothing in ordinary life seems capable of satisfying?

Unlike Plato, Lewis does not begin with the question of what beauty is. He begins with the question of what beauty does. Certain experiences awaken a yearning that exceeds the object that first inspired it. A mountain range glimpsed in the distance, a melody heard at precisely the right moment, a line of poetry that lingers in memory long after it is read, or the sight of sunlight breaking through clouds may leave a person with the strange sense that something important has been encountered and yet remains beyond reach. Beauty delights, but it also unsettles. It awakens a desire that no particular beautiful thing can fully satisfy.

Consider a traveler standing on the rim of a canyon at sunset. For a few moments, the colors seem almost impossible. The light catches the stone, shadows deepen, and the landscape appears charged with significance. Yet what lingers afterward is the longing the view awakened. The traveler may struggle to name the source of that longing because the landscape itself appears complete. The beauty of the moment feels complete, yet it simultaneously awakens a desire for something beyond the moment itself. Lewis believed this paradox was one of the great clues of human experience.

“The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.”

— C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

This insight became central to Lewis’s understanding of beauty. Human beings often assume that the beautiful object itself is the source of the desire they feel. Lewis argues that the object functions more like a signpost. The beauty of a landscape, a symphony, or a beloved person awakens a desire that the object itself cannot satisfy because the desire ultimately reaches beyond the created world toward its Creator. Beauty matters precisely because it points beyond itself. The longing it awakens suggests that human beings were created for communion with God. The experience of longing becomes meaningful because it directs attention toward humanity’s true end.

Lewis’s argument therefore carries ethical implications as well as theological ones. The experience of beauty encourages humility because it reminds individuals that reality exceeds personal desire and control. Human beings do not stand at the center of the universe. They live within a larger order of meaning toward which beauty continually gestures. Ethical life emerges, in part, through learning to orient oneself toward that larger reality. In this respect, Lewis shares Plato’s conviction that beauty points beyond itself, though Lewis identifies the source of that transcendence not with the Platonic Form of Beauty but with God himself.

For Lewis, beauty ultimately serves as an invitation home. The longing awakened by beautiful things directs the soul toward its true home. Human beings desire more than the world can provide because they were created for communion with the One who stands beyond it. Beauty therefore possesses ethical significance because it draws the individual beyond self-sufficiency toward gratitude, reverence, worship, and a deeper awareness of humanity’s true end.

Beauty as Moral Attention: The Murdochian Paradigm

Twentieth-century moral philosophy witnessed a renewed effort to reconnect beauty and ethics through the concept of attention. Among the most influential voices in this conversation was Iris Murdoch, a British philosopher and novelist whose work challenged many prevailing assumptions about moral life. During the twentieth century, moral philosophy often emphasized choice, decision-making, and the exercise of individual will. Ethical questions frequently centered on what a person ought to do. Murdoch believed this emphasis overlooked something more fundamental. Before human beings act, they perceive. Before they make moral choices, they interpret the world around them. The quality of moral life therefore depends, in large measure, upon the quality of attention.

Murdoch drew significant inspiration from Simone Weil, whose writings treated attention as a form of spiritual and moral discipline. Building upon this insight, Murdoch argued that ethical growth requires learning to see others more truthfully, more patiently, and with greater freedom from the distortions created by self-interest. Human beings naturally interpret the world through the lens of personal desires, fears, ambitions, and grievances. As a result, people often see simplified versions of one another rather than the complex realities that actually stand before them. Moral development begins when perception becomes more accurate, more generous, and more attentive to what is truly there.

Unlike Plato, Murdoch does not ask whether beauty reveals a higher metaphysical reality. Unlike Lewis, she does not focus upon beauty as a sign of humanity’s longing for God. Her concern lies closer to ordinary experience. She asks what beauty does to the person who encounters it. Encounters with beauty can interrupt the constant tendency to place the self at the center of attention. For a moment, consciousness becomes absorbed in something other than its own concerns. Murdoch refers to this movement as “unselfing,” a temporary release from the habits of self-preoccupation that so often distort perception.

Consider a person standing quietly before a painting. For several minutes, the demands of the day recede into the background. Attention shifts toward color, texture, composition, and form. Or consider a hiker pausing beside a river, watching sunlight move across the surface of the water. The moment possesses no practical purpose. Nothing is being acquired, achieved, or controlled. Yet the experience draws attention outward. According to Murdoch, such moments matter because they train the mind to attend carefully to realities beyond itself. The same habits of perception that allow a person to appreciate beauty also contribute to the ability to see other human beings with greater honesty and care.

“The direction of attention is, contrary to nature, outward, away from self which reduces all to a false unity, towards the great surprising variety of the world, and the ability so to direct attention is love.”

— Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

This insight forms the heart of Murdoch’s connection between beauty and ethics. Beauty serves as a discipline of perception. The attentive appreciation of art, nature, or human character trains individuals to recognize complexity, particularity, and value in the world around them. Moral excellence therefore emerges through practices of sustained attention that resemble aesthetic perception. Learning to see clearly becomes an ethical achievement.

For Murdoch, goodness and beauty belong to the same structure of experience because both require the individual to look outward with honesty and care. Ethical understanding grows through an increasingly accurate perception of reality and of other persons. Beauty matters because it cultivates the habits of vision through which such perception becomes possible. In this respect, Murdoch offers a distinctive answer to the ancient question of beauty and ethics. Beauty does not lead the soul upward toward the Platonic Good, nor does it awaken the longing for God that Lewis describes. Beauty teaches human beings how to attend. Through that discipline of attention, the world gradually comes into clearer focus, and moral understanding becomes possible.

Conclusion

The philosophical relationship between beauty and ethics has never yielded a single consensus, yet the enduring vitality of the debate reveals something important about human experience. Plato understood beauty as a path leading toward the Good itself. Lewis understood beauty as a summons toward the God for whom human beings were made. Murdoch located the ethical significance of beauty within the discipline of attention through which individuals learn to perceive reality more truthfully. Their conclusions differ, yet all three philosophers arrive at a similar insight: beauty changes the one who encounters it.

“Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

— Philippians 4:8

The young lover who suddenly notices beauty everywhere, the traveler standing before a canyon at sunset, and the person standing quietly before a painting all experience the same fundamental movement. Attention shifts away from the self toward something perceived as valuable. Philosophers disagree about where that movement ultimately leads. Plato sees an ascent toward the Good. Lewis sees a longing for God. Murdoch sees the cultivation of truthful attention. Yet each account suggests that beauty matters because it enlarges human perception and reorients human desire.

The ancient question remains compelling because it touches a central feature of moral existence: the quality of our vision shapes the quality of our lives. Human beings become ethical not merely by following rules but by learning to see more clearly, attend more carefully, and respond more faithfully to the realities before them. Whether beauty reveals the structure of reality, awakens longing for transcendence, or trains attention toward the world and other persons, it continually invites human beings beyond the confines of self-interest. In this respect, the conversation between beauty and ethics continues because both concern the same enduring challenge: learning to recognize and respond to value wherever it appears.

For educators, students, and discussion groups, the following Socratic questions may serve as a starting point for further exploration.

Socratic Questions: Beauty, Ethics, and the Actor’s Attention

Beauty and Perception

What makes something beautiful?
Does beauty exist within an object, or does beauty emerge through the way we perceive it?
Can two people encounter the same thing and experience different degrees of beauty? What accounts for the difference?
Is beauty discovered, created, or recognized?
Does beauty reveal something true about reality?
Why do experiences of beauty often feel meaningful?

Beauty and Ethics

What is the relationship between beauty and goodness?
Can something be beautiful and morally corrupt at the same time?
Why have philosophers repeatedly connected beauty to virtue?
Does the experience of beauty change how we treat other people?
Can beauty cultivate moral character?
If beauty directs our attention toward something valuable, what happens when we fail to notice beauty?

Plato

Why does Plato describe beauty as a ladder leading upward toward truth?
What kinds of beauty occupy the lower rungs of Plato’s ladder? What kinds occupy the higher rungs?
What does Plato mean when he suggests that beauty can lead us toward virtue?
Is Plato describing aesthetic experience, moral development, or both?

C. S. Lewis

Why does Lewis describe beauty as producing longing?
What kinds of experiences awaken this feeling of longing?
Why might beauty feel incomplete?
If beauty points beyond itself, where is it pointing?
Does longing help us become more ethical?
Can desire for something transcendent change the way we live?

Iris Murdoch

What does Murdoch mean by attention?
Why does Murdoch believe moral failure often begins with failures of perception?
How might learning to see more clearly lead to acting more ethically?
What does Murdoch mean by “unselfing”?
Can beauty teach us to notice realities that self-interest would otherwise overlook?
What is the relationship between attention and love?

Theatre and Acting

What happens to an actor’s work when attention remains focused on self-performance?
What happens when attention shifts entirely to the partner?
How does Meisner’s emphasis on “the reality of doing” resemble Murdoch’s concept of attention?
Can truthful acting occur without genuine attention?
What kinds of beauty emerge during a scene when actors stop trying to appear interesting?
Is stage presence created by self-expression or by responsiveness?
Why do audiences often describe truthful performances as beautiful?
Is beauty in performance the result of technique, attention, relationship, or some combination of all three?

Final Synthesis

Plato suggests beauty leads us toward virtue. Lewis suggests beauty awakens longing. Murdoch suggests beauty trains attention. Which account best explains your own experiences?
What do these three philosophers agree upon despite their differences?
If beauty consistently draws us beyond ourselves, what does that suggest about human flourishing?
Could the actor’s task be understood as an ethical discipline of attention?

Join Jill Szoo Wilson on Substack

Hi everyone,

About a year ago, I began writing on Substack, and I’ve come to really enjoy the platform. It feels more interactive than a blog and less overstimulating than social media. It’s a place where I read and share work alongside essayists, poets, and other writers. I also share small daily thoughts and photos there, the kinds of things that don’t always become full pieces.

This summer, I’ll begin releasing podcast episodes, many focused on theatre and communication arts, with occasional Christian reflections and observations from nature, and I’m looking forward to adding more interactive elements over time.

I’d love to see you there. And of course I’ll continue sharing here, too.

Peace to you,
Jill

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Beyond Equivocation: Say What You Mean with Confidence

When I was a sophomore in high school, I had an English teacher I admired greatly. She taught me how to properly structure essays and understand the mechanics of writing. One afternoon, I was called into her classroom to work on an essay she had given a failing grade. I was flummoxed by her judgment in the moment and let her know.

“You have to learn how to do it correctly before you can break the rules of writing. Right now, we are learning the right way.”

A couple of years after I graduated, I went back to visit her. We remembered that moment together, and I thanked her for the discipline she forced me into.

While I’m grateful for that lesson, it isn’t what I remember most.

The treasure I carry from her is this:

“Don’t ever justify yourself in writing. Don’t say ‘I think’ this or ‘I believe’ that. Just say what you mean and move on.”

I’ve written that way ever since.

For me, at fifteen, her advice was revolutionary. Girls are raised to be nice, to soften their language, and to defer to more established voices. Truth is often framed as something to be approved before it can be spoken.

I give this advice to every student who comes to me in the writing center or in class, and I feel a special conviction for it when I’m speaking to young women:

Write the truth. Stand behind it. Don’t justify your own thoughts.

At some point, you learn to recognize the difference between a sentence that is reaching outward and one that already says what you mean, in confidence. You can feel it when it settles, when the words hold their weight and don’t need to be subject to equivocation. That is the place to write from, not as a performance or a plea but as a statement. Something known, something claimed, something set down with the full understanding that you might change your mind tomorrow or next year, but for today, this is exactly what you meant to say.

On Writing, Voice, and Iris Lennox

In January 2023, I made a New Year’s resolution to write more poetry. For once, I actually followed through. I wrote quite a bit that year, but most of it was just okay.

What I started to notice was that all of it sounded like me, but not in that beautifully cohesive way where you can tell a piece is by Emily Dickinson or Wisława Szymborska. There was something a little circular about it.

So the following year, I started taking poetry classes and workshops with real, working poets.

I’m not sure if I’ve gotten better, but I do know this: listening to other students’ and poets’ work in the room changed everything.

I started thinking thoughts I hadn’t thought before and feeling things I didn’t expect to feel again. Just from listening to people write about ordinary moments. The kind that light you up, or break your heart, or make you want to live, but on fire.

Life is so rich and dynamic, and also boring and mundane. And you can write about all of it.

So, I created a pen name: Iris Lennox.

This summer, I’ll be publishing a book of poetry under that name. It felt like the right time to start sharing some of that work and to give that voice a little more room to grow.

I also created a website for it:

irislennox.com

I’ll be sharing poems and short pieces there as I continue developing this side of my writing.

❤️,
Jill

Free Speech and the Right to Think

By Jill Szoo Wilson

At least once a semester in communication class, I bring up the name of a famous actor or actress from the 1990s, and the students have no idea who I’m talking about. I register my surprise, make a big deal about how they don’t know anything about the world, and then show them a clip from a movie featuring said actor or actress.

This is boots meeting the ground in education.

Last semester, the name that eluded them was Meg Ryan. Fortunately, when I showed them a scene from When Harry Met Sally, two of the students recognized her. It is also important to note that most of them had not seen the movie, and when one of them asked who the short guy in the scene was, I had a second reason to faint in despair.

Let us pause in remembrance of decades past.

Moments like this have become familiar. Each year introduces a slightly different horizon of reference, and a shifting boundary between what is assumed knowledge and what has already passed out of view.

Most of the time, these gaps remain at the level of shared culture. A film, a music reference, or a name that no longer carries immediate recognition. The loss is noticeable, though in all honesty, it rarely feels truly consequential.

This week, the gap carried a different kind of weight.

I mentioned the name Jordan Peterson, and again, the room was silent. No recognition. No point of entry.

To close the gap, I had to do more than show a clip.

Peterson’s work engages questions about the conditions of thought itself, particularly the role of language in shaping what can be known, examined, and understood. Across lectures, interviews, and public debates, he has returned repeatedly to a claim that carries significant implications for how human beings think and speak. People do not first arrive at a fully formed thought and then express it. Instead, we speak in order to find out what we think, and in doing so, begin to understand what we are actually trying to say.

Using this framework, speech is not only a means of delivering a finished idea. It becomes the place where the idea is formed. Most people are not walking around with fully developed positions waiting to be expressed, although social media can create that impression. Most honest people are working their ideas out as they go. They try something in language, hear it, adjust it, run into a contradiction they did not expect, and sometimes arrive somewhere they did not plan to go at all. Peterson himself often spoke this way in lectures, beginning with a premise and working through it in real time. That is a brave act to perform in front of a thousand people on some random Tuesday.

Peterson’s claim situates speech within a longer intellectual tradition. Lev Vygotsky described thought as developing through social interaction, with language serving as the primary tool through which internal reasoning takes shape. Ludwig Wittgenstein located meaning within use, suggesting that the limits of language and the limits of thought remain closely intertwined. Within this framework, speech operates as one of the conditions through which thinking becomes possible.

When considered in this light, the question of free speech acquires a different kind of weight. The issue extends beyond the circulation of opinions or the management of public discourse. It reaches into the conditions that allow thought itself to emerge.

In the classroom, this becomes visible in small, subtle ways. A student hesitates before raising her hand because she’s not sure how something will land. A comment is softened, or abandoned altogether, because it might be taken the wrong way. A question goes unasked because it feels easier to stay quiet than to risk being misunderstood. None of these moments appear particularly dramatic, though each one narrows the space in which thought can be worked out in real time. It removes the moment where a person hears themselves clearly enough to recognize that something does not hold… or that it does.

Whatever thoughts are constrained in the room do not disappear. The student conceals them and at times carries them elsewhere to test in a more sympathetic environment, where agreement is more likely.

When speech does not disappear but simply moves out of view, it changes shape. Without response or resistance from the real-life community, ideas tend to harden. What might have been clarified in the open becomes more certain in private. For example, a student writes something in a discussion board they know will not be challenged, and it stays exactly as it is. The same idea, spoken out loud in a room, would have met a question, a pause, a raised eyebrow, something to press against. Without that, it holds.

Some amount of friction is part of how thinking happens. It gives ideas something to meet, something that reveals both their limits and their strength.

To think with any depth means holding two competing ideas at once without reducing either one into something easier to dismiss. Something that can stand on its own. It means articulating a position you do not agree with well enough that someone who does would recognize it. It means resisting the urge to resolve the tension too early. That kind of thinking is slower. It asks for precision. It asks for attention. And it asks for restraint, the willingness to let both ideas remain intact long enough to actually see them.

That work depends on language. It depends on the ability to say something before it is complete, to hear it, and to revise it.

What takes place in a classroom extends into the wider structure of public life. The same dynamics appear at a larger scale, where the pressures shaping speech influence the development of thought across entire communities. When speech narrows, whether through formal restriction or informal pressure, the range of what can be articulated begins to contract. Thought continues, though along more limited paths. Some ideas remain unspoken. Others circulate without meaningful challenge. Over time, this reshaping of discourse influences what can be examined, questioned, and understood.

Peterson’s insistence on the role of speech in thought formation places him within this broader conversation. His position has generated controversy in part because it resists attempts to separate language from its cognitive and social functions. To speak carries risk. It opens a person to misunderstanding, critique, and revision, and places a developing thought into contact with other minds. That contact is where refinement becomes possible.

The stakes of this position become clearer when viewed through the environments in which thinking occurs. A classroom, a conversation, or a public forum. Each serves as a site in which language mediates the development of ideas. The freedom to speak within these spaces does not guarantee clarity or truth. It establishes the conditions under which both can be pursued.

What began as a question about who students recognize in a classroom unfolded into a larger inquiry about how knowledge is formed. Cultural memory shifts. Names recede. New figures emerge. Beneath these changes, the underlying process remains consistent. Thought develops through articulation, through response, and through the sustained interaction between language and understanding.

Within that process, speech holds a central place. It allows a person to hear what they are saying closely enough to recognize where it holds and where it begins to shift.

In the end, the question of free speech returns to something simple. It has to do with whether there is still room to say something before it is finished, and to let it change in the presence of other people.

War and Freedom at the Table

By Jill Szoo Wilson

I grew up in Los Angeles. I was a little white girl with blue eyes and light brown hair who spoke Midwestern English, including words like “warsh” (wash), “far” (four), and “ope!” (excuse me).

I was born in Missouri and lived there through first grade, so my earliest circle was made up of white people and black people. That was it. Maybe there were Chinese families at the grocery store, church, and in other public spaces, but my child-sized world was small and mostly familiar.

Then we moved to Glendale, California, and everything changed. My entire circle of friends was from the Middle East, Mexico, and the Philippines. Not a white girl in the bunch. Rousing afternoons and weekend days spent riding bikes, playing hide-and-seek, and staging epic rounds of capture the flag usually ended at someone’s house, and every house had its own signature aroma. My Middle Eastern friends’ families were often cooking with warm, earthy cumin. The Mexican homes smelled like chili peppers and tortillas. The Filipino homes carried a garlic-and-ginger mixture I still associate with cozy evenings around tables filled with soups I didn’t recognize and meat that tasted just a little tangy.

At my house, we served spaghetti or some kind of beef dish. The smell my friends remember has been reported to be cookies and pot roast. Missouri was doing its best, and honestly, it held its own.

By around eleven, I was conversationally fluent in Armenian and Spanish, with an honorable mention in Arabic. I remember my best friend’s mom laughing when I tried, very earnestly, to ask in Armenian if my friend could come out and play, and then letting her come anyway. In other homes, I was called “azizam” and “mija,” terms I didn’t understand at first but quickly came to recognize as affection.

Today I want to share a story I heard in the home of a girl with whom I went to school and who joined my Girl Scout troop at my invitation. I’ll call her Susie. That’s not her real name, and it doesn’t matter. Even if I shared it, you probably wouldn’t pronounce it correctly unless you heard it spoken. Susie was born in Kuwait. Her family immigrated about a year before I met her, and they lived down the street from our apartments in a small rented house. Three generations lived under one roof. No one had their own bedroom because there were only two to choose from. Even so, they had a small, carpeted kitchen that likely used to be a front porch, and no matter what time of day I showed up to play, I was offered something to eat. Usually it was fruit. Sometimes it was a kebab with yogurt sauce on the side.

No one in Susie’s family spoke English, so she became their spokesperson. Looking back, I can see how that pulled her into responsibility early. It gave her maturity, and it also gave her a kind of pressure she spent her teenage years trying to outrun. Even so, she was fiercely loyal to her family and proud of the country they came from.

After visiting Susie’s house several times, I met her grandmother. I was shocked, though I tried not to stare and felt bad about the surprise that must have registered on my face. Susie’s grandmother did not have legs from her thighs down. I didn’t ask why. I didn’t want to draw attention to it because I didn’t think it would be polite. Susie told me later, when we were out of earshot, that her grandmother had lost her legs in a bombing in Kuwait during the early 1980s.

At the time, I only understood it through the language Susie used: “the Ayatollah.” Years later, I would learn that Kuwait, though not ruled by a religious leader, was caught in the aftershocks of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the long Iran–Iraq War that followed. In December 1983, a series of coordinated bombings struck Kuwait, carried out by militants aligned with revolutionary Iran. Civilians were injured. Families were changed. For Susie’s family, the name of the Ayatollah—whether Khomeini or Khamenei, the distinction unclear to me as a child—became shorthand for the violence that rearranged their lives. History sorts out geopolitics. What I saw was a grandmother in a small house in Glendale who moved through her kitchen without legs and still insisted I take a second piece of fruit.

There were other stories, too.

Katrina was my closest friend. I’m changing her name as well. I was such a mainstay at Katrina’s house that I had a favorite pillow, and her dad made sure my favorite Armenian snacks were always on hand. One of which was called Nazook, and looked like a little rolled-up cookie.

Katrina’s family immigrated to the United States about three years before I met her. The neighborhood we lived in had a large Armenian population, and her dad was in his early fifties. He tried to learn English, but it didn’t come easily, so Katrina often interpreted for him. He welcomed me into his home nearly every weekend and tried, in his careful English, to talk with me anyway. One evening, he told Katrina and me stories from home. I remember jokes I didn’t understand and geopolitical truths that wouldn’t come into focus for me until the last decade of my life. What I remember most clearly is his passion: for justice, family, and God.

One night, Katrina’s dad told us about a bar he and his friends used to frequent somewhere in Armenia. I’ll condense the story to get to my point: there was a framed picture of Jesus over the bar. One afternoon, a group of Muslim men came in and told the owner to take the picture down. Tension rose to the point that Katrina’s dad assumed a brawl would break out. Instead, one of the Christian men sitting at a table invited them to sit, and the argument moved from fists to words. They talked openly and intensely about the differences between Jesus and Muhammad. Katrina’s dad said the tension diffused, but a palpable passion rose on both sides of the debate. In the end, the men shook hands and the strangers left. He ended his story with this moral: “All your life, remember to follow Jesus. Never Allah.” I was ten and already a Christian, so I didn’t hear it as an abstract opinion. I heard it as a kind of warning, spoken with the urgency of someone protecting what he loved.

Whatever you think about his views, I remember hearing words and names I had never been aware of before that conversation. Muslim. Allah. Muhammad. Genocide. Maybe even Azerbaijan (he was a thorough storyteller). I remember trying to compare Katrina’s dad’s stories with what I had heard from Susie’s family. I didn’t understand the geopolitics. I was mostly fascinated by the rising intensity in his voice. Years later, I researched the history.

In the 1970s, Armenia was still a republic within the Soviet Union. It was officially atheist, yet deeply and unmistakably Christian in cultural memory. The Armenian Apostolic Church had shaped Armenian identity for nearly seventeen centuries, and faith remained woven into family life even when it could not be openly displayed in public institutions. When my friend’s father told us that story, he was speaking from more than a single incident. He carried the inherited memory of the Armenian Genocide of 1915, when hundreds of thousands of Christian Armenians were killed under the Ottoman Empire, and he had lost members of his own family in the long shadow of those conflicts. For him, the story was not abstract geopolitics. It was a warning shaped by history and grief. When he urged us to follow Jesus all our lives and not Muhammad, he was urging steadfastness in a faith that, for Armenians, had become inseparable from endurance, identity, and survival.

In the weeks before the current U.S.–Israeli strikes on Iranian targets began on February 28, 2026, Iranian women filled the streets with uncovered hair and lifted faces, moving in broad daylight as if their bodies belonged to them again. Men walked beside them, chanting and clapping, holding the line with a relief that looked almost like grief. The Islamic Republic, born in 1979 and enforced through decades of moral policing, surveillance, imprisonment, and economic theft, tightened its grip until ordinary life felt like a cage. These marches rose from lived experience: futures narrowed, dignity rationed, women punished for fabric, young people trained in obedience as survival. When a woman pulled off her hijab and danced, the gesture carried the weight of years endured in silence. When a man shouted beside her, he carried his own ledger of losses.

In the streets of the United States, some protest the way that freedom is defended, while elsewhere its absence still shows up in bodies, in kitchens, in the quiet insistence to feed a child who has come to play.

Freedom is not an abstraction. It smells like cumin and chili peppers and garlic and ginger. It sounds like accented English and laughter layered over grief. It looks like a grandmother without legs navigating through her kitchen and still pressing fruit into a child’s hand.

There are moments when restraint preserves peace, and moments when action preserves people. I am grateful that there are still men and women willing to stand in that line. I am grateful for freedom. I am grateful to live in a place where children like me could grow up listening to stories from Kuwait and Armenia without fearing the knock on the door.

But what do I know?

I still say “bolth.”

Casual Impact

By Jill Szoo Wilson

One cold, misty evening in January, I was sitting on my couch, scrolling through a website that lists job openings in my area. I was looking for a part-time position to run in tandem with my teaching assignment for the Spring semester. While my teaching load for the following school year included an overload between courses and directing a play, my Spring semester had quietly unraveled. Three classes had dwindled to one due to enrollment. Then that single class was enrolled at half capacity, which meant I would receive half of my pay.

I was still just as eager to begin the semester. The work itself had not diminished. But I needed to supplement what had quietly disappeared.

Anyone who has lived inside contract work in higher education knows its strange duality. The work is beautifully fulfilling and wildly unpredictable. During the first decade after graduate school, I averaged five classes per semester and often directed a show or coached a forensics team. I taught at two major universities, one surrounded by fields and open sky, the other pressed into the pulse of the city. On any given week, I might hear speeches about crop rotation and cattle auctions, then read papers on bioethics or constitutional law. I moved between farm boots and briefcases without leaving the classroom.

That panoply of subjects, people, and cultures has been a jewel box in my life. I did not take it lightly.

Two weeks ago, I chose to leave higher education. Not because it failed me. Not because I lacked joy there. A casual couch scroll opened a door I had not been seeking. A senior writing role at a large nonprofit ministry drifted across my screen. The position was full-time. I was searching for part-time. I still do not know why it appeared before me.

Yet as I read the description, something in my stomach came alive. It felt like excitement braided with fear. The kind of recognition that arrives before logic can intervene. A little too good to be true.

So I applied.

After a rigorous interview process, I received the phone call that shifted the trajectory of my career. As of today, I have completed my first week as a professional writer. I will also be able to weave in my love of performance by coaching actors and eventually directing in-house video and on-screen advertising projects.

Gratitude feels too small a word. But it is the truest one I have.

If you have followed my writing for any length of time, you know that my life detonated in 2020. There have been extraordinary highs and devastating lows since then. I will not rehearse those chapters here. I will say this: 2020 taught me that as long as we can breathe into the palms of our hands, we have choices. And life will change.

Sometimes it explodes. You hear the pieces fly overhead and crash down around you like shards of nuclear glass.

More often, life alters you quietly. It presses into the most meaningful parts of who you are becoming with a force so subtle you almost miss it. Sometimes change comes in the middle of a storm on the high seas, with sharks circling below. Other times it arrives with a sip of chamomile tea and the small square of space your finger occupies on a trackpad.

In the meantime, God. Always God. Orchestrating. Allowing the good, the bad, and the heartbreaking to fashion you into who you are becoming, at both the cellular level and in the broad strokes of His artistry.

Over the past year, I wrote more than I had ever written before. As that season began to close, I realized how much I would miss the act itself. The shaping of sentences. The long wrestle toward clarity. That realization drew me toward this new role. Especially once I saw that I could invert the hierarchy I had lived within for years. Writing would become the vocation. Theatre would become the ministry.

I have learned to keep my eyes awake. Not merely open, but awake to the possibilities of being alive inside a life that refuses to remain fixed. We cling to routines, to jobs, to people, to time itself. We hold them tightly as we dodge and sometimes integrate the slings and arrows that fly across this world. Yet life keeps moving. And so must we.

I will end with this.

Yesterday evening, I was hiking through a wood I know well. As sunset approached, the shadows lengthened and the creatures that run across the forest floor and the birds that alight above grew restless. It was loud. Urgent. Like an airport terminal at dusk. Everyone coming and going, crossing and recrossing the same narrow paths.

I stopped.

My stillness felt amplified against the constant motion around me. Above me stood tall, thriving trees preparing themselves for Spring. At my sides lay trunks that had fallen long ago, softened by time and weather. Growth and decay in the same frame. Arrival and departure breathing the same air.

And in the midst of it, I thought, This is life.

And it is beautiful.

Today’s Students Want to Be in the Room

By Jill Szoo Wilson

When I first began teaching, I was greatly concerned with following the rules. The structure. I wanted to be excellent at classroom management, precise in my instruction, and certain that I was building lessons in keeping with the professional writing on schema and constructivist philosophy. In those early years, my focus was largely on myself as a teacher. I cared deeply about my students and always understood teaching as an act of service. I simply did not yet know where I could soften the scaffolding of instruction. A great deal has changed since then.

Over the last several years, I have begun to understand listening less as a technique and more as a pedagogical stance. It has moved from the periphery of my classroom practice to its organizing principle. The shift did not originate in theory alone, though constructivist philosophy prepared the ground. It emerged in response to the students themselves.

The students I have this year feel different from the cohort that came immediately before them, and in some ways, more familiar to me. They remind me of the people I went to college with. There is the same restless energy that marks young adulthood, though it no longer carries quite the same sharpened edge of constant self-performance. The previous group often felt harder to reach, their attention shaped by the pressure of perpetual visibility. This year’s students carry that pressure as well, yet they seem fatigued by it. Many are attempting to return to the room, to inhabit the present rather than curate it.

Their uncertainty does not read as performance. It feels like an honest hesitation about what it means to be seen in a world where exposure easily becomes spectacle. Distinctiveness may generate engagement on TikTok and offer a fleeting sense of identity, yet it does little to cultivate the steadiness required to share presence with another human being.

As I have written elsewhere, the animating question of my generation was, “What is the meaning of all this?” The question I hear now has shifted: “In all this meaning, what is the truth?” My Fall 2025 Introduction to Theatre class coined the term “Meta-Absurdism” to describe this condition. They were searching for language to articulate the experience of living inside interpretive saturation, where every moment arrives pre-framed, pre-commented upon, and already circulating before one has had time to encounter it directly. The struggle, as they described it, is not a deficit of meaning but an overabundance. The difficulty lies in its density.

That conversation lingered with me through winter break. Their description of being submerged in unending interpretation suggested something deeper than cultural noise. Beneath the compression of commentary and analysis, I sensed a more elemental need, one that had not yet found adequate expression.

To serve them well, we must respond at that level. The most powerful thing we can offer is not more framing, not sharper analysis, not quicker interpretation. It is attention. It is listening.

Listening is often described as a supporting skill in theatre training, yet its function is far more elemental. It is the ground beneath technique, the stabilizing force that allows every other aspect of the craft to take shape. Without it, even the most refined method hardens into display. Long before the modern acting classroom adopted the language of “listening,” Stanislavski articulated its essence. His writings on communion describe a disciplined form of attention in which the performer redirects focus away from the monitored performance of the self and toward the living reality of the partner. Communion exceeds mere awareness. It is reciprocal attention, the willingness to allow the other person’s truth to sculpt the moment.

By “truth,” we do not mean biographical fact or private confession. We mean the actor’s lived behavior in the present: the modulation of the voice, the shift of weight, the breath that precedes thought, the emotional temperature that forms without effort. These observable adjustments cannot be manufactured or predicted. They emerge as the natural consequence of attention. When an actor listens, they permit the real impulses of their partner to shape both internal and external response. The partner’s truth becomes the sculpting force that continually reshapes the unfolding moment.

To allow another actor’s truth to shape the moment requires the relinquishment of control. The performer sets aside the illusion of executing a predetermined design—how the line will sound, where the gesture will land, which emotion will dominate—and permits their choices to be redirected by what they receive. A hesitation, a quickened pace, a softening in the partner’s voice becomes an artistic pressure that alters the next impulse. The scene remains alive because it is formed not through private invention but through the tension of two attentions meeting in real time.

This shift carries profound pedagogical implications. Many beginning actors assume their task is to express: to display an emotion, clarify an intention, or demonstrate understanding. Listening reorders that hierarchy. Expression follows reception. The actor does not begin with what they intend to project but with what they are prepared to receive. Meaning takes shape inside relationship, where something shared begins to move between people.

This is the heart of communion: the recognition that authenticity onstage is revealed through relationship. When actors allow their partners’ impulses to shape their own, they enter the shared field where theatre actually happens, a field in which presence is not displayed but exchanged.

Stanislavski did not use the contemporary vocabulary of “listening,” yet the discipline he describes aligns closely with what modern pedagogy identifies as the actor’s most fundamental skill: the capacity to let awareness travel outward (Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares; Building a Character). His system makes clear that technique succeeds only insofar as the actor relinquishes the self-protective habit of monitoring and enters the dynamic exchange of communion. What emerges from that shift is not performance but encounter; the moment when the life of the partner becomes the organizing force of the scene, and the actor responds from connection rather than construction (Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares).

Stanislavski helps us see what listening makes possible onstage, yet the reason it matters so deeply in the classroom extends beyond performance. Many of our students move through the world feeling unanchored, flooded by information yet starved for genuine reception. They are bright and capable, but often unsure where their own voices begin beneath the noise that surrounds them. Theatre pedagogy, when rooted in listening, becomes a place where they can be gathered rather than scattered. Listening allows us to meet them where they are, to steady their attention, and to let them experience the quiet dignity of being heard without having to perform for it. In that moment, psychology and craft meet. We are not simply teaching acting; we are helping students locate themselves again. Listening becomes an affirmation that their inner life carries weight, that their presence matters, and that their voice can emerge within relationship rather than in isolation.

Meisner and the Practice of Being Changed

Meisner’s repetition work leads students into the same territory Stanislavski describes, though he arrives there through a form that is striking in its simplicity (Meisner and Longwell). Two students sit across from each other. One makes a concrete observation, such as “You look nervous” or “You’re smiling,” and the other repeats it. The language remains plain, free of interpretation or embellishment. At first, the students feel awkward and self-conscious, as though they are performing a meaningless task. Yet the structure is doing something essential. It is clearing mental space.

Repetition removes the usual distractions that pull young actors away from the present moment. They are not asked to invent emotion, craft a backstory, or plan a choice. They are asked to observe. The exercise strips away the impulse to be interesting and replaces it with the discipline of noticing what is directly in front of them. Gradually, repetition loosens the mental habits that have shaped them for years. They begin to release the tendency to plan ahead, curate themselves, or manage perception. With each exchange, attention shifts away from the internal monologue that governs much of daily life and toward the partner encountered in real time.

This is the heart of the exercise. Repetition invites the actor to enter the moment without agenda and to let attention settle on the lived behavior emerging between them. As they echo what they observe, they begin to feel how a partner’s smallest shifts can alter the emotional temperature of the exchange. The work becomes less about producing responses and more about allowing responses to arise. Over time, the exercise cultivates a quiet confidence in the actor’s capacity to be shaped by another person’s behavior. They stop reaching for significance and begin to recognize that the scene is already forming within shared attention.

This shift is transformative. Many students, especially those formed within digital culture, are accustomed to managing their image. They monitor gesture, expression, and tone with the precision of editors shaping content. Repetition interrupts that pattern. It grants permission to stop curating and begin responding. It creates a protected space in which feeling does not need to be immediately converted into display.

For students who spend much of their lives being watched yet rarely received, this work becomes more than a technique. It becomes a rehearsal for presence. It teaches them how to be affected without losing themselves, how to be changed by another person in ways that feel grounded and authentic. In this sense, repetition offers not only a method for acting but a means of reclaiming voice. That reclamation occurs not through outward projection but through the experience of being heard in the presence of another human being.

The Lineage of Listening

Listening in the art of acting has a lineage. Throughout the twentieth century, major practitioners approached it from different angles, yet each returned to a shared conviction: actors learn to act by learning to attend.

Spolin introduces listening through improvisation, giving students their first embodied experience of responding without preplanning (Improvisation for the Theater). Her games may appear playful, yet they place rigorous demands on attention. Students must register what is offered, adjust in real time, and remain available to change. The moment their focus drifts into planning, the scene loses its pulse. Spolin shows that spontaneity grows not from clever invention but from disciplined noticing. Listening steadies the uncertainty inherent in improvisation and gives it shape.

Grotowski deepens attention by removing what obstructs it (Towards a Poor Theatre). His training asks students to release muscular tension and the habitual defenses that dull perception. As those patterns fall away, sensitivity begins to widen. Students register shifts in breath, stance, and impulse. Listening moves beyond auditory awareness and becomes a full-bodied practice in which the entire field of behavior is taken in with clarity.

Brook widens this field still further to include space itself (The Empty Space). He teaches that theatre arises in the charged distance between people, not within any isolated individual. Students recognize this when shared focus alters the atmosphere of a room. Meaning forms within that space of mutual attention. Listening becomes a way of organizing experience rather than a technique applied to it.

Hagen returns attention to the texture of ordinary life (Respect for Acting). She treats observation as foundational rather than supplemental. Her exercises ask students to watch behavior as it unfolds: how a voice carries emotion before words surface, how physical stance shifts under pressure, how circumstance shapes response. Listening, in her view, develops through disciplined attention to the immediate world.

Taken together, these practitioners outline a quiet progression.
Spolin awakens attention.
Grotowski deepens it.
Brook widens it.
Hagen sustains it.

What holds their work in conversation is the understanding that listening forms the basis of connection. It steadies students who feel scattered. It slows perception so the moment can be met rather than managed. As students work within this lineage, they begin to experience incremental but unmistakable change: nervous systems settle, awareness sharpens, and the impulse to grip the moment loosens. Listening becomes less a performed skill and more a way of being that grounds them in the classroom, onstage, and within their own lives.

Theatre becomes a place where they learn to locate themselves again.

Teaching as Encounter

This understanding reshaped my teaching more deeply than any technique I once tried to master. Structure still supports the work, and craft still gives it shape, yet neither reaches a student until a relationship begins to form. Listening opened that threshold for me. It clarified the difference between the appearance of engagement and the experience of it. It reminded me that presence has weight, that a classroom gathers its meaning not through display but through the way people meet one another inside a moment.

Students arrive having spent years monitoring themselves. They know how to be visible. They know how to be evaluated. What they have practiced far less is the quiet reciprocity through which actual contact takes place. When the work turns toward listening, the atmosphere inside the room begins to shift. Responsibility for the moment no longer rests on a single pair of shoulders. Attention is shared. The room grows lighter. Conversation begins to feel less managed and more alive, shaped by what emerges rather than by what is performed.

Listening as Ethical Formation

For this reason, listening stands at the ethical center of theatre pedagogy. It requires humility and patience. It asks students to allow another person to matter in ways that influence the moment. Within a culture saturated with reaction and self-presentation, this demand is significant. Listening rehearses a different mode of being.

As the practice deepens, students develop steadier relationships with tension. They learn to remain present when meaning feels unsettled, to respond without tightening around outcome, and to sustain attention when perspectives diverge. These capacities grow gradually through repeated experiences of meeting another person with openness.

In time, theatre becomes more than performance training. It becomes a small version of shared life, something students can feel in the room before they name it. Students experience how attention is distributed across a room, how meaning forms between people, and how mutual awareness can hold both ease and difficulty. The ensemble ceases to be an abstraction and becomes a lived structure.

Listening prepares students for these relationships wherever they encounter them. It offers a way of moving through the world that is grounded, perceptive, and responsive to the lives unfolding around them.

Returning to the Beginning

When I first began teaching, I believed that if I prepared well enough, the room would respond. I trusted in structure almost instinctively. I built detailed lesson plans, mapped the arc of discussions in advance, designed assignments that felt coherent and defensible, and told myself that this was what seriousness looked like. In many ways, it was. Structure gave me confidence. It kept me from wasting their time. It allowed me to enter the classroom with a sense that I had done my part. But after enough years had passed, I began to notice that something essential could still be missing even when everything on paper was sound. A room could be organized and still feel unreachable. Students could complete every step of a well-designed exercise and remain strangely untouched by it. The work was happening, but it was not always connecting.

That realization did not arrive as a theory. It arrived as an observation. I began to notice when a student stopped bracing. I began to notice when a discussion shifted from performance into response. I began to notice how quickly the energy in a room changed once students sensed that they were not being watched for error. Their breathing slowed. Their speech lengthened. Their thoughts stopped fragmenting mid-sentence. The difference was not dramatic, and it did not produce applause. It produced attention. And attention, once it gathered, seemed to hold the work in a way no structure could accomplish on its own.

Students now come into the classroom already dispersed by the world they inhabit. Their attention has been pulled outward in so many directions before they ever sit down. There is commentary waiting for them, evaluation waiting for them, and visibility waiting for them. Listening cannot erase that atmosphere; it simply creates a different one inside the room. It makes it possible for students to experience a moment in which they are not curating themselves. Something shifts when they realize they are being met rather than measured. They begin to respond instead of adjusting.

Over time, I found that what I had once tried to secure through structure was actually emerging through attention. The lesson plan still mattered. The exercise still mattered. The craft still mattered. But they came alive only when they felt safe enough to inhabit the work itself. When listening became the ground of the work, the classroom no longer felt like a place where competence had to be demonstrated. It began to feel like a place where presence could be practiced.

That change is difficult to quantify, but it is unmistakable when it happens. Students begin to stay with one another a little longer. They hesitate before interrupting. They allow silence to do some of the work. They begin to experience themselves as part of something shared rather than as individuals managing their own projection. In those moments, they are not trying to locate themselves through output. They are locating themselves through relation. The rest follows from there.

2026: Cultural Divides, Covenant, and Coffee

While 2025 has been marked by dramatically shifting plates under the surface of humanity, it has also been a time of growth, resilience, and gratitude.

Every morning, my husband prepares my coffee. It doesn’t matter what time I wake up, whether we share a similar schedule, or when he goes to bed after coming home late from rehearsal or a work engagement. Each morning, it is my privilege to walk into the kitchen, whose counter is fully lit with whatever sunlight the day is offering, a small gaggle of houseplants, my favorite coffee mug, and a French press cleaned and poised for boiling water.

This might seem like a little thing. But when you consider the aforementioned shifting plates, this morning routine is a respite filled with consistency and love. Little things are where life is lived.

This is the year I went back to teaching after enduring the most tumultuous four years of my life. The time between the summer of 2020 and the summer of 2024 taught me more about who I am than I had learned in the previous forty-something years. Anything good in me was a result of God’s grace, the beautiful kindness of those He placed in my life, and an enduring seed of the Word planted and watered over years of joy, hardship, victories, and defeats. In other words, I learned that I am far more limited than I once realized and far more equipped to handle the slings and arrows of this life than I deserve to be. As Paul reminds us, it is by grace that any of us go forward at all.

God’s love. God’s provision. The fruit of the Holy Spirit. These are life itself. And everything else in this life becomes mercy in His hands, through which we learn how to trust, laugh, cry, hold, and let go. This life is a journey in which we begin to recognize the absolute goodness of God and learn to look forward to the age to come.

So, teaching.

In 2025, I returned to teaching theatre and communication. I won’t write in detail about that topic here, because I’ve been writing about it quite a bit lately. What I will say is this: the best thing about teaching, for me, is that I get to sit with young people, find out who they are, how I can serve them, and where I can help them grow. Not only toward learning or career goals, but toward becoming the best version of themselves.

My entire teaching career has been one of planting seeds. I’ve never once had the same student twice. Because I’ve taught foundational courses like Introduction to Theatre, Public Speaking, Foundations of Communication, and Theatre History, I tend to see students in class during their earliest semesters and then see them in the halls for the next two to four years. It’s rare that I get to see the fruit of my own labor, but those moments do come. When they do, they are a gift. Either way, because my work has been to plant seeds, I’ve learned to quickly see how I can best serve whoever is in front of me and make the best of our time together. I count this a blessing, and a great deal of fun.

These past two years were also significant because this is when my husband and I went through the Book of Revelation in its entirety. It took us one year to read and study it, and another to sit with the implications of the revelation of Jesus for our lives yesterday, today, and forever. I have a feeling this is what I will be writing about for much of 2026. For now, I will simply say this: there is nothing more important in life than studying the Word of God, putting our faith in Him, obeying His Word, and trusting in the finished work of Christ on the cross, His resurrection, and the fulfillment of God’s covenant promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in Christ. These promises are not only future hopes. They are realities already unfolding now and finding their full completion in the age to come. Understanding that changed how I read the whole of Scripture.

God has always related to His people through covenant. From the beginning, He bound Himself to humanity with promises He alone would keep. He made a covenant with Abraham, promising blessing, land, and descendants, and declaring that through Abraham’s family all nations would be blessed. That covenant was carried forward through Isaac and Jacob and entrusted to the Jewish people, through whom God revealed His law, His faithfulness, and His name to the world. Jesus did not replace this covenant. He fulfilled it. In Him, the promises of God find their “yes.” Those who belong to Christ are grafted into this story, not as replacements, but as recipients of mercy, heirs by grace. The covenant God made with Israel is not erased by Christ, and the mercy extended to the nations does not diminish it. This covenant is not only about where history is going. It shapes how we live now, grounded in faithfulness rather than fear, held by a God who keeps His word.

This was the year I came to more fully understand the history of my own faith. Not fully, of course, but enough to give me context for God’s plan, His story of redemption, and His magnificent love. It was the year I stopped placing myself in the stories of the Bible and began to recognize, by the power of the Holy Spirit, that the entire Word of God is His story. It is filled with types and shadows of the Messiah, with good and evil, and with the absolute miracle that you or I get to be part of His story at all.

This was the year I learned, once and for all, that I need to be on His side. God is holy, and there is no possible way I can earn my way into His presence. Jesus came to this earth as the perfect sacrifice to a holy God, and it is only through Him that I can approach the Father. Through Christ, I am made clean. When God the Father sees me now, He sees His Son. There is nothing I could have done to earn His favor. Christ is the hope of glory.

This is the year I began to understand God as my Father. Because my earthly father disappeared when I was one year old, this has long been the aspect of God I struggled to trust. Not because I didn’t want to or didn’t believe He deserved my trust, but because I didn’t know how. God has been patient with me. I can now see that He has allowed certain storms in my life for a specific reason: so that I would humble myself and cry out, “Help me, Father.” There is a vulnerability only a daughter can feel and a kind of help and safety only a Father can provide. I trust my heavenly Father.

The world grew frightening this year, didn’t it? The political climate and our general sense of safety have been eroding. People are being killed for their faith. Riots fill the streets. Traditions are canceled because people are afraid to gather. Glowing screens in every household carry the noise of the world into our lives.

It is frightening.

But God.

There is a peace that surpasses all understanding, and it comes from one source alone. This year, by His will and for His glory, my resolution is to speak more about Him and to learn and teach about Him, His sacrifice on the cross, why it matters now, and why it is the only thing that will matter in the age to come.

So, 2026. Cultural divides, covenant, controversy, and coffee. What an adventure!