Beauty, Horror, and the Human Condition, with Elizabeth Bruenig

“It’s sort of strange to think about beauty and horrible circumstances together. But I try, probably clumsily at times, to bring beauty to a thing that's really horrible. … But in terms of covering executions, there is just a void there. The main character always dies.” (Elizabeth Bruenig, from the episode)

Despite sin, there remains an inherent beauty and goodness throughout creation … including humanity.

And even in the most divisive circumstances, when we appeal to the beauty and horror in our shared human condition, we might be able to find common ground for mutual understanding and collaboration. And sometimes, in the best circumstances, we might even find a beautiful and life-giving encounter with the other.

In this episode, celebrated journalist and self-described “avid partisan of humankind” Elizabeth Bruenig (staff writer for The Atlantic, and formerly the New York Times, Washington Post, and The New Republic) joins Mark Labberton to talk about journalism, her journey toward Catholicism, the complex moral and emotional lives of human beings, capital punishment and violence, and the prospects for introducing beauty into polarized politics and horrifying evil.

About Elizabeth Bruenig

Elizabeth Bruenig is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She was previously an opinion writer for the New York Times and the Washington Post, where she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. She has also been a staff writer at The New Republic and a contributor to the Left, Right & Center radio show. She currently hosts a podcast, The Bruenigs, with her husband, Matt Bruenig. Elizabeth holds a master of philosophy in Christian theology from the University of Cambridge. At The Atlantic, she writes about theology and politics.

Show Notes

• Elizabeth Bruenig shares about her religious and philosophical background
• Bruenig shares about her journey toward Roman Catholicism
• The Eucharist and embodied experience of God
• The real presence of Christ in the Eucharist
• “I don't need to be studying and getting degrees, I need to just be living my life radically as a Christian.”
• Journalism, paying attention, and compassionate
• “I'm very interested in people and people's moral lives. Things like honor and shame, guilt—you know, very complex emotions—interest me a lot, and I think everyone has them all the time. People have these spiritual, ethical, moral struggles going on inside them. And so everybody is a little universe unto themselves.”
• What it means to be a Staff Writer
• Journalism with narrative, story, opinions, and arguments
• “I have found that to be a very successful way of garnering stories. It's just to listen to people.”
• “The first execution I ever witnessed, I witnessed for the New York Times, it was during Trump's spree of federal executions. I think they executed something like 13 people in six months, really unprecedented. I wanted to report on that.”
• Media witnesses as
• The Executions of Alfred Bourgeois, David Neal Cox, James Barber, Kenny Smith, and Alan Miller
• “I have had the opportunity to speak with men who were about to die.”
• “The Man I Saw Them Kill”
• “The idea of execution promises catharsis. The reality of it delivers the opposite, a nauseating sense of shame and regret. Alfred Bourgeois was going to die behind bars one way or another, and the only meaning in hastening it, as far as I could tell, was inflicting the terror and the torment of knowing that the end was coming early. I felt defiled by witnessing that particular bit of pageantry, all of that brutality cloaked in sterile procedure. So much time and effort goes into making executions seem like exercises of justice, not just power. Extreme measures are taken at each juncture to convince the public, and perhaps the executioners themselves, that the process is a fair, dispassionate, rational one. It isn't. There was no sense in it, and I can't make any out of it. Nothing was restored, nothing was gained. There isn't any justice in it, nor satisfaction, nor reason. There was nothing, nothing there.”
• Faith, the void of execution
• “I find that reading great essays summons language in me.”
• On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry
• “Beauty inspires reproduction”
• “It's sort of strange to think about beauty and horrible circumstances together. But I try, probably clumsily at times, to bring beauty to a thing that's really horrible. … But in terms of covering executions, there is just a void there. The main character always dies.”
• “I had a religious conviction going into the first execution that I was at that executions were wrong and it wasn't really based on anything that I could point to. I just had the, you know, very simple notion that killing people is wrong and that it's wrong in, in all cases, even if the person is a very bad person.”
• Two executions in the New Testament: the one Jesus halts, and the one that kills Jesus
• Execution as a subhuman act
• The logic of criminal justice system and capital punishment
• The difficulty of introducing beauty into polarized politics
• “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 8)
• Groaning beauty
• “All of creation groans under the weight of sin.”
• “The holiness of creation, the goodness of it, is so strong that it can't be, I don't think, entirely blotted out by sin. I just don't think that humans have the power to rob of beauty that which was made beautiful.”
• Finding beauty in visual culture, pop culture, museums, essay writing, and art
• On Beauty, Eula Biss— “… her prose, you know, glitters to me. I think it's fantastic. Not too melodramatic, restrained. And elegant.”
• Marilynne Robinson, imagination and beauty
• The political landscape
• Fears
• “I think when what's up for debate is like the rule of law, then I'm going to go with the candidate who whatever other faults is actually in favor of the rule of law. I think that's very important.”
• Assisted Suicide and Physician Assisted Suicide
• “I don't think I can write without bringing in theology, because it's so much a part of what I consider to be true. And so to give readers an honest view into what I'm thinking I have to provide the theological Issues that I'm thinking through.”

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.