The Truth and Beauty author—converted at 49 after wrestling with Jesus’ paradoxes like "turn the other cheek"—shifts focus from theology to poetry, tracing Romantic poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats’ existential echoes of the Gospels amid post-Revolutionary doubt. Born from late-night Miami conversations with son Spencer Clavin, the book argues these flawed but visionary writers bridge modern unbelief to Christ’s teachings, revealing how their "natural supernaturalism" mirrors Jesus’ own language. A literary key to reclaiming faith in a fractured world. [Automatically generated summary]
I have a new book coming out, a book that is extremely important to me, and I hope it will be something you will desperately want to read.
It's called 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.
I don't think it's a book that anyone else would have written, and I hope you will go on and pre-order it so that the publishers know that people are interested in it and want to hear about this.
I thought just to introduce some of the concepts in the book, I would bring on my son, Spencer Clavin, because he is one of the smartest people I know.
He is the host of the Young Heretics podcast.
And there are other reasons we should, you're the right person to talk to this about.
Our ideas are very much interwoven in a lot of ways.
Presumably, I mean, I have no idea how I got here.
I just, one minute I was walking down the street in Nashville.
Suddenly, some other guy with the hood came out from behind me.
No, it's actually, it is really wonderful to be talking about this book, to see it come to fruition, because I've been there from the beginning.
I mean, this book begins with a conversation between us.
And I often say to people that I find it hard sometimes to know where your thought begins and mine ends.
We spend so much time talking about ideas.
But tell the folks a little bit about that conversation that we had.
Well, you know, it's funny because actually this is coming full circle in a lot of ways.
I was talking about it.
We were sitting in Miami.
We were there visiting your sister, my daughter, Faith, and her new baby at the time.
It was years ago.
And at the end of the day, when the baby would go to bed and we'd go back to our little apartment, we would sit out on the balcony and do what we always do, which is drink and talk.
And we would, it was New Year's Eve and it was a very beautiful, I remember panorama of the fireworks going off all over Miami.
And we started talking about the Gospels.
And I said to you, I don't fully understand the Sermon on the Mount.
And the thing is, I became a Christian late in life at 49.
And I see the Gospels a little differently than a cradle.
You know, cradle people just kind of suck it in.
Cradle Christians have just kind of are full of the gospel and they understand it from the start.
To me, a lot of the things that Jesus says don't make entire sense.
And the one that I always think of is Peter walking on water and he gets frightened and he starts to sink and Jesus says, oh ye of little faith.
And I think, how much faith do you have?
If you take one step on water, you have more faith than I do because I have a lot of faith and I can't walk on water.
And you said to me, and I have always said this is one of the smartest things anybody ever said to me, I said, I said, I feel like the sermon makes sense if I could just turn the lens and bring it into focus.
And you said, maybe the problem is you're trying to understand a philosophy when you should be trying to get to know a person.
And I thought, that's exactly right.
And I'm going to go back.
I taught myself Greek badly.
You speak Greek like a Greek, but I read it.
We worked on it together.
We speak very good Greek.
You read good Greek.
And I decided to read the Gospels without any theology, without any reference to any thought about what Jesus was saying, and without even reference to St. Paul.
Just read Jesus and try and get to know him.
And that was the plan that resulted in the truth and beauty.
Wow.
No, it's funny looking back.
It was nice that we had that balcony so that we could stop bothering everybody else around us, which is usually what we do.
Yes, that's right.
He's like, could you keep it down while we're talking about Jesus?
Well, it's interesting what you say.
I think that that phenomenon where people just breathe in the Bible and gospels, especially, like the atmosphere, it's very wholesome and good for people who were raised with Christianity.
But it also means that sometimes it's hard for people to hear these words freshly.
And that's kind of, I think, why the church needs new infusions of new blood all the time as converts, people who come to the church late in life, like you, and me to some respects.
I was an adult as well.
You see things that maybe people have just sort of always, you know, you hear these verses all the time at Christmas.
Faith In The 60s00:02:33
You hear this repetition of these words over and over again.
They seem kind of basic to you until you realize this is an extraordinary human person at the center of the story.
What does all of this have to do with the romantic poise?
This is a book about...
What does any of this have to do with?
That is the thing that I can find hard to explain, but I do explain it in the first chapter, so you only have to read, which is available now on the Zondervan website.
But the thing is, as I started to read this in this new way, remember, I was not going to think anything that the church had said or anybody had ever told me.
I was just going to listen to Jesus and watch what he did and how he behaved and what he said.
And as I was doing that, some of these strange things that he says, like turn the other cheek.
I mean, everybody says that's a good thing, but is it, you know, if somebody slapped me, I think I'd knock him down.
But not only do I think I'd die, I think that would be the right thing to do.
So why do we listen to that and hear something profound, you know?
And as I was reading it, I thought, I've heard this somewhere before, something like this somewhere before.
And all these verses of poetry, some of my favorite poetry, some of the most beautiful poetry, came back.
And they were the Romantic poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Wordsworth, who helped C.S. Lewis, the great apologist, find faith.
And Wordsworth, who helped himself find faith, and Coleridge, who was one of the most brilliant men of his time.
John Keats, who's one of my favorite poets.
But the thing is, the time that they were living in was weirdly like this time.
A revolution, the French Revolution, which they thought was going to change everything into paradise, just like we had the 60s when we thought, oh, you know, now we're going back to the garden.
It failed utterly, just like the 60s failed utterly.
Conservatism took its place, but then the conservatism couldn't take care of all the changes that had happened in people's minds.
People were starting to doubt whether marriage was right, whether women's roles and men's roles should remain the same.
They were starting to doubt the government, whether it was a good thing that the government should continue, whether was Britain a good country or was it a bad country?
Just like we started to think, is America just racist or is it still a great country?
All of those things, and all of them, just like now, centered on the question of unbelief.
The fact that people were losing their faith in God, which is happening, was happening then and it's happening now.
And these poets had to deal with that.
And a very famous critic named M. H. Abrams said what they did was they turned religion inward and they tried to develop what he called a natural supernaturalism.
Now, it didn't entirely work because you actually need Jesus to make all of it make sense.
Faith Gained Through Poetry00:00:59
But in doing that, they gave us such beautiful poems that help you understand what Jesus was saying.
Yeah, you know, there's a passage in Surprise by Joy that I see.
I think you maybe quote it in the book that he says, to the man coming up from below, Wordsworth is like a sort of a ladder or like an invitation.
And as you say, Wordsworth eventually gained his faith, sort of gained it back in some ways.
But he had to work his way back through the problems of his time, sort of the way we do.
Well, I have read this book.
It's very good.
Where can people pre-order it?
They can pre-order it on Amazon, wherever books are sold.
I hope they will.
And again, it does end with a long, long part passage on Jesus and how the wisdom of this poetry illuminates what he's saying.
So I hope 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.