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

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."

BUY THE BOOK

Published Apr 5, 2022

272 pages

Average rating: 7.33

3 RATINGS

|

Community Reviews

PA Patriot
Jul 29, 2025
9/10 stars
Well written, well developed story of the lives of Romantic artists, how their lives intertwined and influenced each other, and how their literary works reflect their struggle with a world that was becoming less like Christ. The false freedom presented by being of the World versus being one with God as intended and how that is reflected through the literature of both artists and the Word through the life of Christ. "If your life expresses your soul, the idea of you in the mind of God, then that is how you will live in the mind of God forever. If your life expresses another idea that lives elsewhere, you will live elsewhere. Forever."
Cochrancat
Jan 06, 2023
3/10 stars
Not written by a Catholic philosopher but by someone who is exploring a Christianity. This reads more like a masters thesis. Occasional points of brilliance.

See why thousands of readers are using Bookclubs to stay connected.