The Eric Metaxas Show - Margarita Mooney Clayton

Episode Date: May 30, 2023

Margarita Mooney Clayton addresses the uplifting nature of art and its effect on the human spirit with her book, "The Wounds of Beauty: Seven Dialogues on Art and Education."

Folks, welcome to the Eric Mattaxas show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's legacy p.m. Investments.com. Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. They say it's a thin line between love and hate, but we're working every day to thicken that line, or at least to make it a double or triple line. And now here's your line jumping host, Eric Mattaxas. Hey there, folks. This is one of those shows. One of those shows that you don't hear on other programs, because I have the joy and the freedom to talk to people that you're just not going to hear on other programs, at least as far as I can tell. One of those people at the top of the list is Margarita Mooney, now Margarita Mooney-Swarz, recently Mary. Congratulations. Thank you.

Who has been on the program before. Margarita, let me just tell people. You're an associate professor of practical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. That says it all, in a nutshell. You're the founder of the Scala Foundation. We've discussed that in the past. You have a new book out. I want to talk to you about the book. And I just love this.

It's called The Wounds of Beauty, Seven Dialogues on Art and Education. This is, you know, you can talk about this yourself, but I will say that, you know, a lot of times I think people are sick, really sick of kind of breaking news, what's going on right this minute, this minute, this minute, we need to step back and we do that not infrequently on this program to talk about the big questions to help us to process life and how we deal with, moment, so to speak. And that's one of the reasons I was excited to get you in here in the studio to talk about the book, The Wounds of Beauty, Seven Dialogues, and Art and Education. So let me ask you the question that I've answered in my own way. Why did you feel led to write this book, The Wounds of Beauty, Seven Dialogues, and Art and Education? What is your thinking? Well, Eric, I began my work on this book actually right around the time that the lockdown started for the COVID pandemic. And I don't know if you, or maybe some of our listeners are familiar with

CS Lewis's essay, Learning and War Time. Oh my gosh. That, listen, you don't know this, but I've been very recently immersed in Lewis and that kind of thing. And you're quite right. That sums up, at least what I'm thinking about and what I know you're thinking about, because you just brought it up. So please have at it. Well, he says, this is one of my favorite quotes. I'm paraphrase. him here. He says that if humans had postponed the search for beauty and truth until human life was settled and calm, we never would have become the journey, right? So he's speaking to students at Oxford, just as World War II was breaking out. He has served as a soldier in the trenches in World War I and has seen a lot of destruction. And he's saying that the search for beauty and the search for truth,

although it sounds really abstract, is actually incredibly practical and essential to human life. And I wrote this book during a difficult time in this country because I wanted people to recover the tradition of beauty and the forms of beauty that open us up, pierce through ideology, can resist totalitarianism, and draw us toward the absolute. Little did I know that writing this book would actually lead me a year later to meet my husband, David Clayton, who is an iconographer and has a book, it's kind of funny, he has a book called The Way of Beauty. So I published this book as Margarita Mooney Suarez, but very shortly after there, became Margarita Mooney Clayton. So I have gone by several different names. I'm sorry,

that's what I meant. That's what I meant, right. Anyone who's from a Hispanic background can, you know, understands the use of two last names and how names change. I have a really funny essay on my name changing on my website. Well, yeah, forgive me for missing the Clayton part. But I, well, look, I had the privilege of meeting your husband at a Reese and Socrates in the city event. But I want to say to people clearly that goodness, truth, and beauty, these things lead us to God. Precisely. And these things lead us to each other. Beauty leads to goodness and truth.

Goodness leads to truth and beauty. So any temptation that somebody has to say, beauty, that's a non-essential, you know, that's like saying the church is non-essential. You know, that's like saying the church is non-essential. You are mistaken. If you do not understand what is good and true and beautiful, if you aren't thinking about this, or if you aren't somehow innately drawn to these things, or innately moving along the lines of truth, goodness, and beauty,

you can't possibly know how to react in the moment when there's a war, when there's a war, an ideological war, within your own culture, whether there's an actual war like World War II. So these things help us really to be human and to process what's going on. And I just want to make that case. Obviously, Lewis makes the case brilliantly. You're making the case. But I just want to say to people, beware of the siren song, of the urgent and the immediate,

because that will lead you into error. There's just no way around it. It would lead you to error. It will lead you to the rocks. and we have to make time, you know, just as we make time to brush our teeth and to do daily devotions or to whatever it is, take out the trash. You've got to do those things. Otherwise, eventually, everything falls apart. Precisely.

And I think this is an incredibly important time for us in the United States of America to recover the traditions of beauty, which upon which this country was founded. But I'll also share with you, Eric, that part of the reason I care about this so much was that, that when I was in my 20s and I was trying to understand the differences between the United States and countries in Latin America, my mother being from Cuba, I went on several trips to Cuba. And on the second trip, I was able to go with my mother. This was 1999. And after 40 years of the Cuban government telling people that the Cubans who had left needed to be kept separate from the Cubans who had stayed and had been faithful to the revolution, we broke through that to go see the people where my mom had grown up. And when we got to the village where she had grown up, the church, which her family had helped to build, had been turned into a movie theater, and eventually abandoned. But as we're talking to the people in the village, first they brought out little baptismal cards or communion cards.

They had kept memories of the people who left. But then this one man came to us and said, come to my backyard, I have something to show you. And underneath a pile of wood wrapped in canvas and covered and hidden, he was. He had saved two stained glass windows about six by eight feet that he had kept hidden for 40 years. Now, I've heard stories of people hiding chalices and icons and things like that, but we're talking stained glass windows. Why did this man hold onto those windows for 40 years? Because he had hope and because he had faith. And a woman whose name is Esperanza, which literally means hope, asked my mom if her family could work with them to reopen this church.

and they did, and the windows went back in. I mean, that's like, that's a story, Margarita. That's amazing. This stuff is haunting. Because your family has a history with the satanic communists understands how evil that is, you bring a perspective. My mother, with whom I spoke this morning, grew up in, you know, first Nazi Germany and then Stalinist Soviet-occupied East Germany.

My father was in Greece when the communist tried to take over. When you have family history of the evil of communism, because communism is anti-God, which ultimately you and I know is anti-beauty, anti-truth, anti-goodness, it is wickedness itself kind of wrapped up into a political ideology. So when you've lived it and seen it, And now you've traveled there.

It becomes real, and we become voices of hope to people to say, hey, listen, folks, evil is real, and we need to fight for goodness, truth, and beauty. These aren't incidental things that we made up. No. No. And, you know, Eric, it's really interesting. What was on the windows that were hidden for 40 years was the Blessed Mother with a child, Jesus, surrounded by roses, and then Jesus on the cross. But what was really interesting was that my mother noticed not only were the stained glass windows gone, the Rose Garden. was gone. So what happened in communist Cuba when they shut all the churches and expelled all the priests and closed all the Catholic schools? Well, people stopped gardening roses. Because in the

communist ideology, the only thing that matters is material production to satisfy our basic needs. You can't eat roses. Kill them. Precisely. So people stopped gardening. And then shortly after people stopped gardening, guess what else they stopped doing? Working also got closed. Right? So people think, Worship is incidental. It's secondary. What's really primary is production. Well, when you take away worship and you take away beauty and all you're left with is material production. No, no, no. We've got, we're just getting started, folks. I'm getting hot under the collar. We'll be right back. With the overturn of Roe v. Wade, lots of companies are coming out saying they'll pay for employee abortion travel and expenses. Most of you've heard about some of these companies.

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Legacy p.m. Investments.com. Check it out. Folks, I'm talking to Margarita Muni Suarez-Claetan. Des Garcia-I-Vega or something like that. I don't know. Margarita, again, for folks who are unaware, you. You are officially an associate professor of practical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. You've got all kinds of encomia and degrees and accomplishments. But you are sitting here as the author of a new book, The Wounds of Beauty. The Wounds of Beauty.

And what you just said as we went to the break, this sums it up. And I'm just, you know, almost cracking up because I've been talking about this the last few days. What you just brought up, I'm... editing the transcript of a Socrates in the city conversation that I did with Tom Howard, the great, great, great, great, Tom Howard. Thomas Howard passed away about a year ago, who wrote one of the greatest books I've ever read called Chancellor the Dance. And he is making this case in 1969 about, it's exactly what we're talking about, this idea that there are two views of the world. One of them is this biblical idea that goodness, truth, and beauty are essential.

And the opposite idea, this modernist, bleak, atheistic idea, which is really the idea that the communists force on their populations is so anti-human that it leads to death of every kind. It says that flowers aren't important. it says that beauty isn't important. And just look at their architect is grotesque. I mean, their architecture is grotesque. It's all just bleak, modernist, brutalist architecture. Everywhere you look in that world, it's a world without God.

And it's so fascinating to me that here you are saying that in Cuba, they don't just shut down the church, but that they stop planting roses. I mean, that is... It's symbolic of the larger point, which is that, look, and one of the reasons I wrote this book, Wounds of Beauty, I did it as a series of dialogues because it's hard for people who haven't had the time to read a lot on the history of ideas or philosophy to understand these points we're trying to make, that beauty is essential. But one of the tropes about beauty that's not true is that beauty is only for the elites, that somehow high culture is only for people who have a lot of money. But the point I'm trying to make is the opposite, that what we believe is people of faith is that God became man in the person of Jesus Christ, and therefore we're called to sanctify matter. And so we not only create things that we need to satisfy our bodily needs, but we co-create with God and we create order in the cosmos because God created nature, he created us, and he gave us the capacity to co-create and bring order out of chaos.

And so I wrote this book during the time of the COVID lockdowns when there were a lot of protests going on in the United States and a lot of violence happening in our own country, which really dismayed me because I wanted people to have hope and to see that these ideas about beauty that I'm talking about are actually really practical for how you should live your life from a place of hope, the importance of beauty to help you understand patterns and therefore know what your own calling and your own vocation is to create. create a society based on order, not a society based on the idea that all we can ever do is fight against our oppressors and, you know, try to save the victims. Well, when you're done saving the victims and fighting the oppressors, where is it you're trying to lead people? Right. Well, those kinds of people, I'm trying to lead people anywhere. They haven't thought it through, but we need to think it through. We need to think through what kind of a culture do we want to live in. And now I just want to be clear, the book, The Wounds of Beauty, Seven Dialogues on Art and Education, you found seven people with whom you had a dialogue on this issue from different angles. I recognize some of the names. Francis Meyer haven't seen him in a number of years, but just love him.

Dana Joya, we had him at Socrates in the city talking about poetry some years ago. I noticed the name David Clayton is in the book. That's correct. Can you tell us about this? So David Clayton is an iconographer. He is a kind of revert to Christianity after studying material science at Oxford and kind of going down a path of atheism, felt a lot of darkness. And he recounts in this book how he just became dissatisfied with the material comforts of the world and was seeking something deeper. He got some advice and he followed his call to become an artist.

And it was art that drew him back to God. and he decided to study this lost tradition of iconography. And so here he is this kind of revert to Christianity, doing iconography in the U.K. Now, when you say iconography, do we mean iconography in the Roman Catholic tradition, in the Orthodox tradition? What tradition, I mean, because I only know iconography to the extent that I do in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. So he learned with a Greek Orthodox painter named Aidan Hart, who was a recent speaker at the Scholar Conference,

who paints in the Greek Orthodox tradition. David also paints, so he paints Greek, but he also will paint Italian, Sienese style, Romanesque style, and also kind of neo-Gothic icons. But what is interesting about his story and what I'm trying to do in the Wounds of Beauty, I talk to philosophers, I talk to the historian Peter Brown, but I have become really interested in how artists themselves

understand their calling to co-create with God, and what does that mean to them. And so David Clayton, who later on became my husband, he explains that really what happens in art school so often is that artists are taught to be innovative and to express themselves. But he wanted to learn from tradition and he wanted to learn from the great masters and he wanted somebody to guide him. And so what he's actually arguing is that I think in order to renew culture, we need to help artists understand that it's not their job to express themselves. It's their job to express the truth. We're dealing with an at least 200-year-old problem here, right? I mean, the romantic movement, you know, whatever, early part of the 19th century.

This philosophy developed that in the end, and this is ironic and fascinating, it leads to the end of beauty. It leads to a war on beauty. When you think about 20th century modernism and post-modernism, it is at war. with the traditional ideas of beauty. If something is traditionally beautiful, they sneer at it, they mock it, they act as though it's not as sophisticated as my Rothko or Motherwell or whatever it is. It's the tradition of art, not just the visual arts, but poetry. All you need to do is think of the quote-unquote music of John Cage.

it is like a mockery of beauty. It's a mockery of poetry. It's a mockery of art. And at the end of the day, I don't know if you would go so far as to say this, but I certainly do. It is a war on God. Representational art to paint a beautiful mother and child, to paint a beautiful landscape. These things are homages in their way to the ultimate beauty of God. And something happened, you know, as you go through impressionism all the way to the other side, that it became, you know, people look at, I mentioned Longfellow all the time, but people looked at that kind of poetry that everyone might appreciate or the kind of paintings that everyone might appreciate. They sneered at it as though if it's not for the cognoscenti, if it's not for the elites, then it's,

it's somehow pathetic, it's somehow corny. That's part of what we're dealing with here is recapturing this ancient, eternal idea of beauty. Precisely. And so I begin the book with a conversation with the historian Peter Brown, who is an historian and a biographer of St. Augustine. And so he describes through Augustine's encounter with beauty, right, many people who've read the conventions are familiar with this line, late have I loved thee ever ancient and ever knew. And what Augustine is saying there was that he had learned in ancient

philosophy that, you know, the platonic forms with these kind of spiritualized, disembodied, that beauty was this kind of ethereal spiritual other. But it was through Christianity and the doctrine of the incarnation that he realized that, no, beauty is God coming to meet us in this world? And that one idea changes everything. Now, fast forward many centuries, what ends up happening, as you mentioned with the romantic movement, is that they wanted to sever beauty as being, the being of God, expressing itself in the world, communicating to us. They wanted to make beauty a subjective, emotional experience, which was the beginning of all the other problems. Okay, so this, and this is, I guess, you know, you get the byronic idea of the artist, right? Somehow it's about me. I'm the

artist. I am expressing myself, which, as you're saying, is, that's a radical brain. break from everything. It's a radical break. And one of the best moments of my recent conference on art, the sacred, and the common good was when the iconographer from Quebec named Jonathan Pajot said, the beginning of my career as an artist was when I stopped trying to express myself. Because the purpose of an artist is to express truth and beauty and goodness.

And if you're going to do that, you have to know the traditions that have come before you because great artists stand on the shoulders of great masters. I this is ladies and gentlemen in case you want to know what's really important this conversation is really important much more with margarita mooney suarez clayton Garcia ivega etc etc the book is the wounds of beauty are you tired of not getting a good night's sleep well my friend michael has created the perfect solution he didn't just stop at the pillow he also created the geese dream bed sheets Made from the world's best cotton called Giza, these sheets are ultra soft and breathable, yet extremely durable. And now for a limited time, you can get 50% off the Giza Dream Sheets with prices starting as low as 2998. These sheets come in a variety of sizes and colors and have a 60-day money back guarantee and a 10-year warranty.

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On one of them, go to Relieffactor.com or call 800 for relief to find out about this offer. Feel the difference. Hey, folks. The book is The Wounds of Beauty, Seven Dialogues, on Art and Education, the author Margarita Mooney Suarez Clayton. People can remember the wounds of beauty. They'll find you. So you literally met your husband because you were writing this book.

You start talking to this iconographer David Clayton, and next thing you know, your last name is Clayton. You know, I would hope that my story gives a little bit of hope to some of our listeners because David and I were single well into our 40s and for him into his 50s. And I'll tell the truth about how I met him. Was that a spiritual director of mine and a friend convinced me to do online dating Catholic match? And I thought, oh, gosh, this is going to be so boring. Well, in the summertime, I went out to California to do some work out there with a couple different universities.

And a friend said, oh, change your location to San Francisco. You'll, you never know. And I changed my location, which changed what happened in the feet. And this guy writes to me who says, I do a lot of culture and art, and sounds like you're really interested in that, too. I'd love to meet for coffee. and that's how I met my husband. The funny thing was we wondered why we hadn't met in professional circles.

Right. And I think maybe it was a God thing that we were meant to establish a personal relationship before a professional one. Because as a professional woman, in a professional setting, you don't try to get personal with the men you're working with because it just feels inappropriate. So it was actually really appropriate that we met through this seemingly impersonal way that allowed us to be really personal. But we immediately discovered that we shared a passion. for bringing into the present these wonderful traditions and that we really shared a sense of urgency. This is the most important thing that our culture needs to understand.

And he's unique because as an iconographer, he's also written several books on the history of art and culture trying to make the argument that recovering these traditions, as I do, is the way to transform our society and it's the way to transform our politics. But why is that? this is the hardest point I have getting across to people. Precisely, before the break, we were saying people tend to think beauty is personal and emotional.

So it's a jump for people to think that beauty is actually central to what we do as a community or central to what we do as a political community. But beauty, by which I mean, you know, the fine arts and art and music and poetry, which anybody is capable of making in, they invite us to participate in. something that is bigger than us. And my experiences, as I mentioned in Cuba, but I've also traveled through Haiti. I've worked with former soldiers in Central America. My experience time and again is that precisely political ideology wants to tell you, you can't connect to that person because you have a different skin color or because you're from a different class background or because you speak a

different language. But, you know, everywhere I've been, Eric, I can sing with people, I can worship with people. I can help make a meal. And so what I realized was that sharing in beauty is how we generate common goods. The common good is not some sort of quantifiable metric that we split up equally amongst people. No, it's something that we come together, each with our God-given gifts in a diversity of ways, and we co-create the common good. So this understanding of beauty is all about a culture of abundance because God's love is pouring into creation eternally all the time. It hasn't stopped. Whereas what political ideology tells us is, hey, we have to take from some to give to the others or we have to come up with a...

Well, some kinds of political ideology. That's basically the, you know, it's the liberal big state idea that it's a zero-sum game and that in order to help the poor, we've got to take the rich down a notch. We've got to. got to tax them more. It's the opposite of the way the free market is supposed to work where the rising tide lifts all boats. But it is a zero-sum game. And it's very bleak. And it's fundamentally, I mean, this is, you know, we see it now in cultural Marxism, but we saw it in economic Marxism. It is constantly keeping people at war with other people, that you always have to have an enemy, an oppressor, an oppressed. And what you're saying is that God's vision doesn't work.

that way. Look, you just named it. One of the problems with our culture today is that other people are fundamentally seen as a threat to me somehow. Our identity, our very understanding of ourself, is seen as in opposition to other people. And this is a fundamental problem. But what I've seen time and again in my travels throughout Latin America, which I mentioned, but also with my students that I work with at Princeton Theological Seminary and through Scholar Foundation, We need to be creating something that invites everybody to participate from their different backgrounds, not obliterating the social differences we have or the economic differences. Those don't go away. But our identity needs to be founded in something that is beyond us, not in something that is a threat to us, that we're just, as you mentioned earlier, reactive to. And so beauty, there's a great term I've been writing about for a piece I'm going to publish in comment. magazine on devotion to the Blessed Mother. And there's a musical term called The Fug. And there's a writer from England Carol Houslander who's written about Mary like a fugue. Well, what's a fugue? A fugue is a series of

repetitive parts of music that then interweave, right? So think about musical harmony. Musical harmony isn't devoid of tension, and it's certainly not devoid of different voices. But all those things come together to produce a harmony, but they're also repeated and moving towards something. So this idea of the fugue is how I think about culture. We come together with our different gifts, but we have to bring harmony out of our difference, and we have to be moving towards something. Otherwise, we get locked inside of ourselves. We get this buffered self, as Charles Taylor called it.

And that, Eric, that buffered self is a place of darkness, and it's a place of fear. The buffered self. What a horrible idea. I'm glad I'm glad you mentioned it. We're going to be right back, folks. We're talking about the book, The Wounds of Beauty. Welcome back. We're talking with the author of the book,

The Wounds of Beauty, Seven Dialogues on Art and Education. I mentioned I know some of the folks who are part of this book, Dana Joya, who we had at Socrates and City, of years ago, who is a poet and who has written extensively on poetry. He wrote this shocking cover article in the Atlantic monthly. I don't know if it's 20 years ago now. Can poetry matter? And he wrote a book, basically, because he takes the traditional Christian view that, I mean, and he's way more generous to certain people than I would be. He doesn't sneer is hard. But the idea that beauty matters, that the tradition of average people being

able to hear poetry and memorize poetry and understand poetry, that that's important. And that went away. I was referring earlier to Longfellow, how when I was at Yale, you know, I was taught to sneer at anything that rhyme, to sneer at Longfellow, to sneer at Norman Rockwell, to sneer at anything that was traditionally beautiful, to sneer at anything that might reach the masses, so to speak, and not just the elites. And there's an ideology there that. So Dana Joya is part of what he tries to do,

and I just want to talk about him now, and I know we can do another show. But trying to restore poetry in the same way that, you know, you and your husband are talking about visual beauty and visual art. These things are, these are central to culture. If you want to know why everything's gone to hell, you can trace it. It's just fascinating to me. Absolutely.

I think, look, it took me a while to realize this. You know, I studied psychology at Yale in the 90s, and I did my PhD in sociology at Princeton. And I was afraid of talking about beauty because it would sound like, Either I'm superficial and care a lot about appearance and, you know, attractiveness, or that the fact that I liked Gothic architecture more than sort of modern, brutalist architecture, somehow signified that I was elitist. Right.

And so I never encountered these topics. Well, wait, wait a minute. I find this, it's so ironic because on the one hand, they would say you're being elitist and the people who are, you know, advocating for cinder block, you know, Soviet-style, housing, they act like we're for the people. And the irony is only elites could be dumb enough to prefer that ugly stuff and think they're doing it for the people. And that when they accuse somebody who appreciates traditional beauty of being elitist, there's just tremendous irony because the average person, in fact, you know, the non-elites prefer the kind of beauty

that you and I are talking about. I think all human beings do. That's what I mean, yeah. And there's also this trope that building beautiful buildings is more expensive than building cinder block ones. That's not true. I believe Judas was the one who said that in the Gospels. Go ahead. Well, because I think as I discussed in the chapter with David Clayton, the principles of beauty and architecture, it's really about proportion and harmony, right? So it's not about the cost of the materials. It's a question of design, right? So these principles of harmony, clarity that I talk about also with Dana Joya, those are universal principles that people of any income or educational background can perceive and can make. So of course, you know, when I was actually

recently in the Princeton University Chapel, beautiful structure. Princeton University, sadly, has put up some pretty brutalist dorm buildings. And I was talking to the men who are maintaining the University Chapel and they were just saying it looks like a jail. Why did they build those things? Of course it does. So, you know, The fact is that human beings are made to perceive harmony. And what you see in cinder block architecture is not harmony. It's sameness. It's a kind of repetition that has no harmony to it.

So remember a moment ago I talked about music, that it's actually the different notes come together and make whole that's more beautiful than the individual parts. Well, the idea that beauty is simply taking one square shape and repeating it 100,000 times, no, that's not what, traditional architecture was about. I mean, look, there's this famous line. You know this better than I do, but the famous Yale professor Vincent Scully, he said famously talking about, this is a classic example.

It's like the classic example that Penn Station, the old Penn Station was this glorious, glorious building, ennobling, beautiful. People would walk into it and without even knowing why. It would just lift their spirits, and it would just be a beautiful place. Then they tore it down and they built this disgusting rat warren along the lines of, you know, my, and Vincent Scully famously said that one strode into the old pen station like a god. One scuttles into the new pen station like a rat. That ultimately is what we're talking about. Beauty does something to us, because we're not just atoms, we're not just animals. We have souls.

God created us in his image. And so when people say, no, no, no, no, no, it doesn't matter. All that matters is that you get enough vodka and bread and shelter. That's enough for you. They are redefining human beings as less than what God says we are. Precisely. And look, there are many examples of these beautiful kind of architecture in public housing that still survive, for example, in England,

in hospitals and in police stations. Here in New York down at South Ferry, it was a beautiful building. It was a ferry stop, right? So the idea that beautiful architecture is for the wealthy is simply not true historically. And so you're asking the right question,

which is why do we build ugly architecture? And what I think people often don't want to hear is that, and this is what I tell my students, look, it is important to understand that there is a philosophy of the human person behind, the kinds of art and architecture that we see today. And where I think young people intuitively grasp this the most is there concerns about all the

images on social media and the way that those images can be used to manipulate and create a false sense of a need to buy something or a false sense of competition. Well, why don't we think that public architecture isn't also shaping us or dehumanizing us? Uh-huh. Okay, look, we, this is, there's just too much here. So this is the end of this show, but we're going to lock the doors and keep you around so that we can do another show because there's so much more to talk about. Margarita, Mooney, Suarez, Clayton, thank you, and thank you for the book. The book is The Wounds of Beauty. Hey there, there, folks, we interrupt this program to continue doing the program. Is that confusing? Well, I'm confused as well, but we can be confused together. Here's the bottom line. We've been having a substantive conversation with Margarita Mooney of the Scala Foundation.

It's important that we step back sometimes and have these important philosophical conversations about goodness, truth, and beauty. And I just love that. But we're just interrupting that conversation to say, by the way, I don't even know if this is hour one or hour two because we're probably going to run this. But it is Memorial Day, so that's a special day. So we're having an important conversation with her. But I don't want to forget to tell you that we all have an obligation to keep the Republic. Many of you know my book, If You Can Keep It, the Forgotten Promise of American Liberty.

In my book, If You Can Keep It, I don't. talk about how every single one of us has an obligation to keep the republic. It doesn't keep itself. The Constitution is a dead document unless we live it out. It's just sitting there. It's a piece of paper. And part of that is being active citizens, being sometimes activist citizens in keeping the republic. Part of that is informing ourselves about what's going on, about what is true and then taking action. But sometimes taking action is just informing ourselves. So I want to mention to you, there is a film. We've talked about it quite a bit. The real Anthony Fauci is a film. It was a book. It is a book. The Real Anthony Fauci. But it's a film. And you can see it for free.

Today, tomorrow, I believe the rest of this week, the real Anthony Fauci movie.com is the website. The real Anthony Fauci Movie.com is the website. I have seen it. And I just want to say it's delightful that somebody has made a film out of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s book because it puts all the pieces together and it educates us. We need to educate ourselves. We need to know what is going on so we can be a part of the solution. It is a vital thing.

It's kind of like, you know, a basic do. you know, when you're drafted into the army during the time of war, when you are asked to do jury duty, when you ask to pay your taxes, when you're asked to vote, we have to do these things. And so I want to say, please go to the real Anthony Fauci movie.com. Please watch it. I also want to say that we need your help in spreading the word about what we're doing on this program. So we invite you. to sign up at my website, Eric Metaxus.com. There's a lot of stuff going on, a lot of stuff we want to communicate with you. I want to tell you, well, first of all these interviews with people,

like amazing interviews we did at the NRB. We haven't aired them yet. Other interviews we did in the studio at TBN that we still haven't aired them. A lot of great stuff, but we want you to share it. We want you to take these videos and share them. So you have to sign up for my newsletter,

which is at Eric Mataxis.com. I'm going to be traveling. I'm going to be in San Diego. I'm going to be in Chino Hills, California, at Jack Hibbs' church. I'm going to be in Albuquerque, New Mexico. As my father says, Albuquerque. I'm going to be in Albuquerque preaching.

Yeah. And also, don't forget the study guide for letter to the American church. That's really important. It's amazing that we actually, people kept saying, we want a study guide for your book, Letter to the American Church,

letter to the American Church. And I said, well, finally, I said, okay, let's create a study guide. So we created a study guide. You can buy the study guide. You can buy it at Socrates in the city.com or at Amazon, but it's the study guide so that you can read a letter to the American church in a small group. But just lots for you to be involved in. Get involved.

God bless you.