As Scala celebrates its 10th anniversary in August 2026, I wanted to share with you my opening remarks at our recent board meeting. Don’t miss the chance to support our work—every gift this month to Scala will be matched up to $15,000!

Anyone who becomes a monthly patron by donating $100 a month (or $1,200 annually) will get a signed copy of my book When Mary Calls: Surprising Encounters with the Mother of God. Thanks to all of you who have already given. If you haven’t yet given, you still have time!

DONATE

No More Desecration

Are more people hungry for beauty that transcends divisive social categories? Carl Trueman, a professor at Grove City College and personal friend, has argued that the West did not go through secularization but rather desecration.

“The Icons are Coming Alive Again,” was the title of Mary Harrington’s review of my book When Mary Calls. This title captures a larger shift that has happened over the last five years. People perhaps have always talked about cultural renewal, but now they are realizing that without the divine presence flowing through the beauty of that recreated culture, our human nature could be damaged and our hearts turned away from the common good.

Could the tide be turning? Not long ago, Mary Harrington, whom I had the chance to sit down with several times during my time in the UK, never would have guessed she would be writing about Mary, culture, and beauty. She was a secular progressive feminist philosopher. Her wake-up call came when she became a mother. She realized there was something missing. As a result, she began to explore Christianity, tradition, and true beauty, and shares her insights with a large readership.

If Trueman is correct that the symbols of Christianity which undergirded Western Civilization have been targeted for destruction or ridicule, then Harrington was right to pick up on the message of When Mary Calls: cultural renewal must be incarnational—fully human (as Mary was) and uniting us to the divine (as Jesus came to do, and which the Church continues).

I used to fear that Scala would be labeled as somehow un-academic because we promote beauty. But around the US, UK, and elsewhere, families and schools are increasingly recognizing that students need integral formation of the imagination and the intellect. We cannot build civilization without the images that speak to the heart of the joy of living in the truth. Even when evil seems to be growing, beauty inspires people with the courage to do good.

Yet significant hurdles remain. Ugliness and misery run rampant on many college campuses. Too many hearts are drowning in despair, gasping for the air that beauty alone can give.

WILL YOU HELP US SPREAD HOPE?

Thanks to the support of our donors over the last ten years, we have consistently shared this message that beauty is as essential in education and human formation as truth and virtue. Ten years ago, I was passionate to start Scala because I realized that most young people had never heard the message that beauty, creativity, and practicing an artistic talent can be integrated with their intellectual life. They thought education was about choosing a profession, rather than pursuing a vocation and integral formation.

What a surprise was in store for me when just over five years ago, on July 4th, 2021, I met my husband, David Clayton. Just over a year later, on July 23, 2022, we were married.

Because of his decades of work building a network of culture creators who want to evangelize culture, Scala has been able to connect grassroots educators, elite artists and musicians, and intellectuals.

For example, Robert Puschautz, the Executive Director and Founder of Stabat Mater Foundation and Atelier School of Fine Art (stabatmater.org) in Tyler, Texas, traveled to Princeton for Scala’s 2023 conference on Art, the Sacred and the Common Good. Having made a personal connection with David and me at that event, we began to publicize his excellent work and visited his art school several times. Robert has said:

“Through his writing and personal advice over the years, David Clayton has influenced my approach to painting and teaching art in the Catholic tradition. He has visited our studio in Tyler, Texas, a number of times and has been incredibly generous with his time in offering his valuable insights to our students during his residencies. It is largely due to his work publicizing our art program among Catholics across America that we acquired many of our dedicated students. We are delighted to endorse David’s work as part of both Scala Foundation and Pontifex University.“

Growing numbers of people who come to ask us: How do we form the culture?

Our answer is that, as with Robert and the Stabat Mater Atelier, we connect elite artists, patrons of the arts like you, and grassroots educators.

Scala’s accomplishments in its first ten years have set us up to expand our network in the coming 10 years. We expect exponential growth in the numbers we reach through our partnerships with art schools, programs for musicians, classical schools, and churches. Much of Scala’s work is personal and intensive. And it is through those close personal relationships that we can build a powerful network.

We need your support to work on several fronts:

• Ongoing intensive mentorship of the next generation of culture-creators who want to preserve Western civilization and defend its most treasured values;

• Expand work to form patrons who will fund the training of culture creators and new works of art, music and architecture to be commissioned;

• Respond to the grassroots demand for beauty in schools, churches, and families through our publications and videos that reach hundreds of thousands;

• Launch new Way of Beauty fellowships in schools and churches that change lives.

Beauty Transcends Divisions

Across the political and religious spectrum is the growing awareness that ‘cheap’ and ‘false’ beauty does not fulfill the human heart and often leads to misery. The approach we take to all our work is informed by our Catholic faith, but the people who attend our events are from a variety of backgrounds: Christians of various denominations and seekers. All people who are attracted by our vision of beauty come away transformed. Connecting individuals across networks then injects new resources into existing communities.

Restoring beauty is a generational project that goes beyond any election cycle and transcends all people. Our goal is to reform the culture, one personal relationship and one heart at a time requires. We seek collaborators with an entrepreneurial mindset to counter the narrow-minded ideology that reigns in too many circles. With your help, we can build the networks that gather together the growing number of creatives who love tradition, have faith, and aim to renew Western culture.

Will you support Scala’s mission today? Every gift to Scala in August will be matched up to $15,000!

DONATE

With gratitude,

Margarita Mooney Clayton, Executive Director, The Scala Foundation

PS-If you become a monthly patron of Scala at $100 or more a month, or donate $1200 annually, I’d be delighted to send you a signed copy of my book When Mary Calls!

I can’t believe it—Scala is turning 10 this month! We are launching our next decade with a matching gift: every gift given this August — including your first month as a monthly patron — will be matched up to $15,000.

BECOME A PATRON

Why I started Scala in 2016

During my nearly three decades as a student or professor in higher education, I’ve witnessed first-hand how students’ misery was deeply connected to the desecration of tradition and faith. It’s not merely that the intellectual giants of the Western tradition have been forgotten. Too often in education, ideals around family and nation are mocked. Mindless activism replaced creativity, the true engine of a free and joyful society.

Scala’s approach is invitational, not confrontational. We help people connect the hunger they have for beauty to the love of God.

When I met my husband David, we dreamed of finding a way of sharing the intellectual, spiritual, and artistic practices David wrote about in his book The Way of Beauty. Thanks to our patrons, our dreams are becoming reality.

Scala’s work has benefited from so many like you who support us in reversing cultural decline we all can see.

Patrons Are Part of the Creative Process

Donors to Scala do more than give money. They are patrons of the creative process that underlies all we do. Whether you are a reader of this magazine, have attended a conference, or have read our books and articles, or watched our videos, we invite you to help us spread The Way of Beauty.

For example, Daniel Gorenburg, a former student of mine at Princeton Theological Seminary who also participated in Scala’s summer program, is now Assistant Pastor at Providence Presbyterian Church in Hilton Head, South Carolina, and is today a Scala patron. He grew up in California, joined a Christian church in high school, and studied philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley.

As Daniel said:

“Scala was my first serious exposure to Christian philosophical anthropology. The more I remain engaged with Scala the more I am equipped, as a minister, to engage the various perspectives that confuse or distort the human being as made in the image of God.”

When one person like Daniel shares what he has learned with others, the chain of lovers of beauty and truth spreads goodness much faster than any ideology can spread misery. I vividly recall during our summer seminar at Portsmouth Abbey, Rhode Island, how Daniel took some of the younger students under his wing, praying with them after breakfast and encouraging them in the often difficult texts we read.

Now, as a recurring donor, Daniel helps us keep expanding our network of students, artists and families. Would you join Daniel as a patron of the Way of Beauty? Patrons also learn from our network of culture creators how to spread the joy that comes from an encounter with the divine through beauty.

“The Culture Wars Go Silent”

Now is the time to support Scala. The tide is turning; important seeds have been sown that are flowering, and a beautiful culture is once again re-emerging. Take, for example, a frequent Scala collaborator, composer Sir James MacMillan. Born in 1959 in an impoverished Catholic family in Scotland, he has risen to world prominence as a composer and conductor.

He was one of our guests at Scala’s 10th anniversary board meeting. He shared how his faith, once mocked by many in the secular music world, is now sparking curiosity.

Soon, I’ll share more from MacMillan and two other special guests, a second musician, Andrew Goldstein of the Vigil Project, and Dominic Keim, an art student at the Stabat Mater Atelier in Texas. They shared with our board and supporters about how partnering with Scala has amplified their work in education, church life, and the arts.

Will You Help Spread The Way of Beauty?

But today, I simply want to ask: will you join us, as a monthly patron, in this next decade of Scala?

If you become a monthly patron at $100 or more (or $1,200 annually), your first month’s gift will be matched dollar for dollar! And you’ll receive a signed copy of my recent book, When Mary Calls: Surprising Encounters with the Mother of God, whose hopeful message has reached hundreds of thousands who have heard me interviewed.

The book continues to receive attention in unexpected places. For example, MacMillan recently introduced me to journalist and music lover Damian Thompson of The Spectator-UK, who interviewed me in July for his podcast “Holy Smokes”, an apt title for exploring the enduring presence of the sacred in highly secular England.

If you can’t commit to a recurring gift, a one-time gift of any amount still matters enormously — and it will be doubled if you give this month.

DONATE

Words simply can’t say how much I appreciate your support, friendship, prayers and encouragement. I hope our mission graces your life.

Gratefully,

Margarita

P.S. This match is only available in the month of August. Thank you for supporting our mission to renew culture!

As I approach my fourth wedding anniversary with David Clayton, I wanted to share my reflections on having changed my last name. My family still uses at least seven nicknames for me, and I have a total of three last names with which I identify strongly. Each of those names reflects the only unique me who rejoices in all the parts of my identity.

In 1998, working on my graduate school application essays, one them asked me to reflect on how I would contribute to diversity. I wrote,

“My father is Irish-American from New York. My mother was born and raised in Havana, Cuba. I’ve never quite known where I fit into the diversity conversation. But as I’ve spent the last three years living, working and traveling around Latin America, my love for Latin music, food and culture is burning inside of me.”

I was born in Frederick, MD, and given the name of Margaret Ann Mooney. My mom insisted she wanted her four kids to have names that sounded virtually the same in Spanish or English. But she wanted my legal name to be Margaret because it is easier to pronounce than a name like hers—Eulalia. I always knew I was named after my aunt Margarita, and that older family members were also Margarita.

But whether speaking to me in English or Spanish, my mom mostly called me “mami”—a colloquial Spanish way of addressing your children by the name children should call their parents. My father pronounced my name with his distinctive New York ‘r’—Mahrghret.

For the first 21 years of my life, Margaret was the name most people called me at school—but I never liked it. But in my large Cuban family—my mom is one of 14 children and I have more than 50 first cousins on her side of the family—I was often called Maggy or Margarita.

Growing up, everyone knew my mom so I didn’t have to explain that, despite having an American name, I have Hispanic heritage. But when I went to college at Yale, “Where are you from?” and “What are you?” were common topics of conversation. I wanted to be loyal to two heritages. Saying I was half Cuban and half American just didn’t sound right.

My presence and my voice—my writing and speaking—has always been a blend of my two heritages. Growing up, I learned to speak Spanish in conversations at home and with my Cuban relatives and many Latin American friends. But I also learned Spanish through folk songs my mom played on the guitar (like Guantamera) and colloquial sayings she shouted like (No me diiiigas).

I loved Spanish classes in school and exceled in AP Spanish literature my senior year of high school, where I was captivated by the magical realism of the Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges and the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. At Yale, I relished my upper-level Spanish literature classes where we read (in the original Spanish) El Cantar del Mio Cid and Don Quixote de la Mancha.

After graduating from Yale, I moved to Costa Rica in 1995 to work for Oscar Arias Sanchez, a former president of Costa Rica. I embraced the opportunity to go by Margarita publicly and with friends. And, as is the custom in Latin America, I used two last names—my father’s and my mother’s. Margarita Mooney Suarez became my professional name. When my first niece was born while I was living in Costa Rica, I wrote to my brother than I wanted her to call me, “Tia Maggy” (tia means aunt in Spanish).

Living in Costa Rica, it was clear that my customs and habits had been shaped by the fact that I was born and raised in the United States, that I had studied in the United States and that I was fluent in English. But I was also clearly an insider to Latin American culture—it was in my blood, in my Cuban colloquial Spanish, and in my memory.

In Latin America, no one ever asked me if my parents named me after a drink.

Rather, people said things like, “Oh, my first girlfriend was Margarita. My grandmother is Margarita.” Or, they would quote the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, like, “Margarita, está linda la mar.”

Identity, voice, and loyalty were united.

Pictured here are 13 of the 14 Suarez siblings gathered with their parents on the steps of the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., about a decade after moving to the United States in the 1960s.

When I moved back to the United States in 1998 for graduate school at Princeton, I changed my legal name from Margaret to Margarita, becoming Margarita Ann Mooney. I never rejected my Irish-American heritage but simply wanted my legal name to reflect my complex, blended identity and my experiences living in Latin America.

But at Princeton, I stopped using two last names—Mooney and Suarez. I returned back to only using Mooney simply because it is not the custom in the United States to use two last names unless one gets married.

But, more than 20 years later, I’ve decided to go back to using both my father’s and my mother’s last names as my professional byline. In my writing and speaking, I’m beginning to share more about how my voice has been shaped by my loyalty to multiple traditions.

For example, in an article in Plough magazine entitled Rafagas (machine gun fire), I reflect on my work with ex-combatants of the civil wars in Central America. I called a recent talk I gave to young leaders Ganas (a Spanish word loosely translated as desire). In that talk, I shared how even though I’ve been under-prepared or under-qualified for professional opportunities I desired, I always throw myself into everything with passion.

In 2021, I spoke in Spanish via Zoom to a group of university students in Peru about the importance of the life of the mind in a time of crisis. To another group of young leaders across the globe who believe in freedom, I reflected on my seven trips to Cuba between 1994-2007. Speaking to a group of high school students in the summer of 2021, a young Mexican-American woman asked me how I understood my own femininity drawing on two cultures with often different expectations for women.

Subscribe now

The fact that I have gone by Margaret Mooney, Maggy Mooney, Margarita Mooney and Margarita Mooney Suarez just means that many of us at times us different versions of our name because it seems to fit best. My oldest niece—who is now 25—still calls me “Tia Maggy,” and my youngest niece, who is 6, calls me “Titi” (short for Tia Margarita). Going by different names doesn’t change my fundamental identity. Different versions of our name signify affection, loyalty and identity.

Part of my identity is precisely that I have gone by different names in different contexts. The question I got at Yale—“What are you?”—defies a simple answer. My best answer is simply: “I’m me. Listen to my story.”

Yet I know that names, labels and what box you check matters. I may fit into more than one box, use more than one version of my name, and be identified with different labels, but I am just one person.

I wrote this essay to explain why I now will go by Margarita Mooney Suarez in my career. By emphasizing my Hispanic heritage in my name, I am not denying that my father is Irish-American, or that I was born in a small town in Maryland. Compared to someone my age raised in Cuba, I can’t deny the difference my American father and my American citizenship made in my education and culture.

As I wrote in the diversity essay I submitted for graduate school applications in in 1998, “I feel both like an alien and a sister to the people I’ve met in Latin America.” But that feeling of sisterhood and alienation I wrote about, an experience of closeness that is also a recognition of difference from my Latin American brothers and sisters, is no longer a source of confusion or inner conflict for me. My umbligo—my belly button, my core, has not changed.

My two parents each gave me incredible gifts from which to do the work I do and be who I am. The name Margarita Mooney Suarez fits both who I was born as—American and Cuban—and who I’ve come to be—an American-raised, Irish-American, Cuban-American woman who has lived, worked and traveled extensively in Latin America.

My life has only grown in complexity and diversity. I have written a book about Haiti, I have studied mental illness and addiction in small towns across the US, and I have grappled with existential questions raised by suffering and death. Whatever name I have used, I hope what I’ve shared transcends my own experiences and speaks to the universal search for beauty and wisdom.

I have no problem with anyone calling me by the legal name I was given at birth—Margaret Mooney—especially if that’s what I went by when they knew me. At times for convenience or to be recognized as the author of more than two decades of publications as Margarita Mooney, I may only use one surname. I hope my family members still call me Maggy, Tia Maggy, Tia Margarita, and Titi. I used to be embarrassed that my mother called me mami—but now I own it.

But in a time when I want my voice to spring from my heart and reach outside the academy, Margarita Mooney Suarez will be my professional byline. Margarita Mooney Suarez sounds poetic to my ears. It resonates with my heart and reveals my roots.

When people see, read and hear more from Margarita Mooney Suarez, I hope my voice is heard as speaking from the heart from which springs the words and ideas I want to share.

Marriage and Identity: Continuity and a New Beginning as Margarita Mooney Clayton

Who knew that at the very same time I’d write about adding a second last name to my identity to acknowledge my mother and my Cuban heritage in July 2021, I’d meet the man I was going to marry, David Clayton.

Although I had used Margarita Mooney Suarez when I was in my 20s and living in Latin America, it was hard to walk around the US with two last names. Who is Suarez? Your husband? I was often asked. I was often alphabetized by Suarez rather than Mooney on event registrations or plane reservations. Often, Mooney was just dropped and I was just Margarita Suarez (that’s my aunt, but not me).

So, I dropped Suarez to avoid confusion. I never dropped my loyalty to my Cuban heritage, but I thought I’d soon be married and wanted to keep room for my husband’s last name. Who knew that it would take two decades to find a man I loved enough to marry and take his last name?

If I lived in Latin America, I’d be Margarita Mooney Suarez de Clayton, and no one would be confused. Everyone would know that Margarita Mooney, Margarita Mooney Suarez, and Margarita Mooney Suarez de Clayton or just Margarita de Clayton are the same person.

My English husband David is confused by the fact that I have 8 nicknames in my family. No one else seems to be confused. Everyone knows that Maggy, Margarita, Margaret, Tia Maggy, Tia Margarita, Titi, Mamita, and Mami are all the same person—me.

But, in the US, I’ve decided to follow the American custom and legally become Mrs. Clayton. As David and I launch into some professional projects together, we want people to know we are man and wife, as signified by the same last name. Getting married year a year shy of turning 50, it always tempting to see marriage as negotiating 50-50 compromises. But I want name to signify that in my marriage, I’m going all in--100%.

So I’m keeping Mooney—my father’s last name, the name I’ve always used for publications, as part of legal last name, although I’ve had a different second last name (first Suarez and now Clayton).

The 100% me is now legally Margarita Mooney Clayton. But, as we do in my family, you can call me whatever name you feel is most affectionate.

SUPPORT SCALA

Damian was eager to interview me, as my book shows that devotion to Mary is spreading among Protestants in England. One thing he mentioned was that England’s most important shrine to Mary, Our Lady of Walsingham, which was destroyed by Henry VIII in 1583 as part of the much larger suppression of Catholic practices in England during the English Reformation, was later restored by Protestants—the Anglicans.

Catholics helped restore the shrine as well, which is noted in this sign I had seen just hours earlier when I visited Westminster Cathedral, the Roman Catholic Cathedral of London. (It bears a similar name to Westminster Abbey, which is Anglican).

The sign in Westminster Cathedral reads:

“When England goes back to Walsingham,
Our Lady will come back to England.” — Prophecy of Pope Leo XIII when he signed the rescript for the restoration of Our Lady of Walsingham’s Shrine in 1897.

Is this prophecy coming true?

I certainly see a return to Catholicism in England, and to devotion to Mary among Protestants and Catholics there.

For example, before 12:30 Mass at Westminster Cathedral in London yesterday, I noticed young men holding rosaries as they waited to have their confession heard by a priest. Who would have thought even five years ago so many young men would be lining up for confession in England?

During Mass, people of all ages and backgrounds stood, sat, knelt and prayed together. We then knelt together for Eucharistic adoration, followed by an organ concert.

After all that, I slowly walked around, looking at all the mosaics and paintings of Christ, Mary and the saints in the many side chapels. One elderly woman caught my attention. In each side chapel, she touched the statues and prayed softly but audibly.

The rebirth of faith in England includes the surprising return of once-proscribed practices that so many people at Westminster Cathedral were doing: praying the rosary, kissing statues, and lighting candles. Our Lady’s restoration to her shrine in England is indeed a sign of a much larger renaissance of faith.

Damian and I also discussed the surprising trend of young Protestants praying the rosary. The rosary is a Catholic devotion to Mary, which consists of long meditation on Scripture in which, either individually or in groups, people say one Our Father, ten Hail Marys, and the Glory Be.

When Damian asked me to explain why practices like the rosary are returning—not just among Catholics but also among Protestants—I confessed that I was surprised when I first heard about it. But reflected that it might be connected to the fact that Christian religious rituals and practices are not empty; they are ways we use our bodies to live out the mysteries we proclaim.

Christians don’t find God apart from the material world or sensory experiences—we are called to transform it through faith. What we do with our bodies, how we engage with the material world, is filled with symbolic meaning; symbolic meanings help us appreciate the mysteries of faith.

Yesterday after Mass, my heart filled with prayer intentions, people I had promised to pray for. So I lit five candles. Then I followed the elderly lady from the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham to a statue of the Pieta, that is, Mary holding Christ’s crucified body.

The elderly woman devoutly placed her hand on Christ’s wounded hand. She said a prayer.

Next, I approached the statue. One by one, I kissed the five wounds of Christ—both hands, both feet, and his pierced side. I gazed at his face and his mother Mary’s face.

Subscribe now

My worries and anxious petitions melted into a joyous hope. There’s no glory without the cross. Our bodies may not evade illness or death, but we have hope in our rebirth. That’s why I don’t equate the emotional life with the spiritual life. When our emotions go up and down, we can cling to rituals, ask for greater faith, trusting that what we do with our hands, feet, eyes, and breath can be purified so we can enjoy a clearer vision of God at work in all things.

Back by the statue of Mary, I paused for a long time reading this explanation of the sculpture of Our Lady of Walsingham.

The Westminster Cathedral Statue of Our Lady of Walsingham was commissioned by Cardinal Griffin in the Marian Year of 1954. It was sculpted by Pius Dapre. The Cardinal is quoted as saying when this statue arrived … “The Faith in England will flourish, when the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham is flourishing.”

Is the faith in England flourishing? Perhaps not as it once was. But there is an urgency, a heartfelt need for the faith in England, and as journalist Mary Harrington noted in her review of my book, her own need for faith included a hunger for Mary as a spiritual mother.

Just as statues of Mary are coming out of hiding, more people like composer and conductor Sir James MacMillan, whom I talked with Damian about yesterday, are speaking publicly about the faith. All of these things led my husband David to write his reflections as an artist about why devotion to Mary is crucial to preserving the faith. This piece, a follow-up to David’s earlier piece about Mary Harrington’s review of my book, focused on the first seven ecumenical councils and addressed (among other things), the identity of Christ, the Trinity, the question of images in worship, and Mary.

The Way of Beauty

Why Devotion to Mary Is Necessary if We Are to Preserve the Faith and Evangelize the Culture

In a recent posting I wrote about Mary Harrington’s review of my wife Margarita’s new book, When Mary Calls: Surprising Encounters with the Mother of God and in particular about the connection she drew between the purging of images at the Reformation and the long decline of Marian devotion that followed. Harrington sensed that the two belonged together…

Read more

a month ago · 15 likes · 1 comment · David Clayton

Now is a moment when people are open to learning about the meanings of art that depicts Mary. The symbolism of the statue at Westminster Cathedral, among other things, is meant to help us recall that Mary is called the New Eve:

For many years the statue remained hidden and almost unknown in the Cathedral Crypt. It has now been restored and a new lily sculpted to replace the original, lost in the mists of time. There is an old tradition that the Lily sprang from the repentant tears of Eve as she went forth from paradise. Here Mary is seen as the New Eve, the Mother of Life, who bore the FRUIT who redeemed us. An ancient hymn spoke of Mary as: “Hail Mary fairest flower, O Lily glistening white and stainless…”

As Pope Benedict XVI wrote, Mary is the good soil of faith. To look at her face is to pause, and to let God work in our hearts. So explains the sign:

This statue of Our Lady of Walsingham has a particularly beautiful face which radiates contemplative beauty, sorrow, strength, compassion and solace. Just to kneel before this statue is to experience the peace and fragrance of the Virgin.

The child Jesus sits in majesty and communion with His Mother. A sense of the future silent, suffering, interior martyrdom of the Blessed Virgin Mary pervades, indicative of the fertile soil which enabled Mary to stand with Jesus at Calvary, the moment when Jesus bestowed upon her, for all generations, her Divine & universal Motherhood.

The statue is a mini-Catechesis, a poetic meditation on our redemption. So continues the explanatory sign:

Our Lady of Walsingham is the Seat of Wisdom and sits upon a throne. She is amidst two pillars which represent the Church as the gate of Heaven; the seven rings on these pillars signify the seven Sacraments and the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit; the arched back of the throne represents the rainbow, the sign of the Covenant between God and His people; the three fold lily symbolises virginity, purity, sovereignty, sign of resplendent beauty and testifies that Our Lady remained the Blessed Virgin before, during and after the birth of the Saviour Jesus Christ; a toadstone symbolising evil is beneath her feet, showing that she crushes satan and all his empty works; and finally she wears a Saxon Crown representing her Queenship. For Mary is Queen of Heaven and as Our Lady of Walsingham, the spiritual Queen of England.

Following my interview at the Spectator’s office, I strolled past Buckingham Palace and caught a bus back to Oxford, literally arriving at kickoff time for the World Cup semifinal match between England and Argentina. Perhaps these days the World Cup is one place where we see nations unite across political, cultural and class divides.

At pubs all around England, voices, bodies and hearts were united in celebration when England scored the first goal. But an hour later, England fans accepted a 2-1 defeat.

Analogies between sport and religion are often overplayed. But the rituals of sports watching simply remind us that rituals bind us together. Religious rituals in particular bind together the living and the dead into a grand narrative.

Mary’s presence on English soil is made real by the blood of martyrs, by the pilgrims to Walsingham of all faith backgrounds, and by my little candles, prayers and kisses. Mary’s motherhood symbolizes a love that endures beyond any political cycle, sports season, or, in fact, beyond this life.

As the sign next to the statue concludes:

The presence of Our Lady of Walsingham in Westminster Cathedral invites us all to meditate on the missionary role of Our Lady of Walsingham for the re-evangelisation and conversion of England. Our Lady’s Shrine is at a pivotal moment in its history of restoration and revival. Your prayer and help is needed. We can expect a great return to the Faith of our Fathers - and with this in mind - we need to prepare. This will take great Faith and Trust in Our Lord Jesus Christ and in the powerful Intercession of our beloved Lady of Walsingham.

“O England, great cause have you to be glad compared to the Promised Land, for you are graced to stand in that degree, through the glorious Lady’s intercession, to be called in every realm and region the Holy Land, Our Lady’s Dowry; thus are you called from all antiquity.” --Walsingham Ballad published by Richard Pynson, printer to Henry VII.

The Catholic martyrs named in Our Lady’s Chapel at Westminster Cathedral believed in God so much that they walked their own Calvary, looking to Our Lady for comfort. I looked up above at the names of some of the martyrs commemorated in this side chapel. I don’t recognize John Jones, Nicholas Owen or most of the other names.

But Saint Edmund Campion was a Jesuit who publicly attempted to persuade Anglicans, including students at his alma mater of Oxford University, to return to the Roman Catholic Church. He was convicted of treason, imprisoned, and killed in 1581 by being hanged, drawn, and quartered. Today’s home for Jesuits in Oxford, Campion Hall, is named for him, and the undergraduate Catholic ministry the Jesuits run in Oxford is overflowing with new young Catholics.

Margaret Barker, a Methodist minister, theologian and Old Testament scholar in England, has written in her excellent book The Mother of the Lord.

Damian asked me about doctrinal differences between Catholics and Protestants. I explained to him the appendix of my book summarizes Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox writings on Mary. There is more common ground among Christians than many imagine on doctrinal issues. So, let us not make Mary a barrier to Christian faith, but a source of unity, allowing her love to penetrate our hearts and showing her true devotion.

As of today, July 2, 2026, readers in the UK can see master iconographer Aidan Hart’s icon of the Nativity in my book When Mary Calls: Surprising Encounters with the Mother of God, that is now available for purchase in the UK from Blackwell’s, Waterstones, or Amazon UK.

Order When Mary Calls

Mary as the Throne of God

Sacred art not only depicts a historical event but also demonstrates the union of two natures in Christ—the hypostasis. How does an artist like Aidan portray this event both as any other birth that took place in a particular time and place, and as recounted in Scripture, and as one that has a unique spiritual significance, unlike any other historical birth?

In this icon, Mary is presented both as a mother and as the Throne of God, or the Gatekeeper. For Aidan, referring to Mary as the throne of God is not merely an act of exalting her; it is an acknowledgment of God’s love for humankind. This imagery of Mary as the Throne of God traces back to Old Testament prefigurations. For example, the throne in Solomon’s temple was adorned with imagery suggesting divine presence. Mary fulfills and transcends these archetypes; she is not just a container or resting place for divine power, but a living, active throne that collaborates with divine purpose.

This icon of the Nativity by Aidan illustrates how allegorical titles of Mary help reveal the meaning of her presence at key moments in the New Testament and guide us to contemplate the great mystery of the birth of Christ. Aidan insists that he makes icons of the Nativity to help us experience this event again as if we were present at the birth of Christ. Icons of the Nativity invite us to reflect on the paradox of the Incarnation: the union of opposites—infinite becoming finite.

Thus, the mountain and the cave symbolize the Virgin Birth, representing both the divinity and humanity of Christ. The mountain symbolizes Mary, while the cave represents her womb. Our gaze rises to the heavens, yet we also encounter Christ in the cave. The old man in front of Joseph is the prophet Isaiah, reminding Joseph that the virgin birth of Christ fulfills a prophecy concerning his divinity.

Our eyes are naturally drawn to Mary, as she is the largest figure. However, it is not Mary herself who is the most important person in this icon; it is Christ. Mary’s position at the center of this image serves to remind us that her natural motherhood is essential to the union of the two natures—divine and human—in Christ.

The icon also visually represents Mary as the throne of God—she physically supports and presents Christ to the world, just as a throne elevates a ruler to be seen by their kingdom. Yet, unlike an ordinary throne, Mary is not passive; she actively contemplates the mystery before her. This paradox—that Mary is both nurturing Christ as his mother and worshiping him as her God—invites us to reflect on our own relationship with the divine.

The Gospel of Luke tells us that Mary wrapped the baby Jesus in swaddling clothes. Lest we wrap Jesus in shiny wrapping paper and forget that he came to die for our sins, this icon depicts the swaddling clothes as a linen shroud and places Christ in a cave in the rock that is a tomb as well as a place of birth. Thus, we contemplate the birth of Christ alongside a foreshadowing of his painful death and burial.

The throne imagery honors both Mary’s physical role in the Incarnation—her womb physically contained God—and her humble obedience, returning all praise for her back to God. Titles like Throne of God are meant to convey the profound intimacy between Christ and Mary, and, because of her humble obedience to bear God in the world, that a similar intimacy is possible between Christ and us.

When we elevate Mary to a position on a throne, we are not making her into a goddess: rather, we are acknowledging the great mystery that the infinite became finite in her womb. Just as Mary shared an intimate bond with her son while remaining herself fully human, we are transformed through grace to partake of the divine life of the Trinity.

Allegorical Readings of Scripture

I included Aidan’s conversion story and his work as iconographer in my book because many Christians—not only Protestants but also many Catholics like myself (before I met my husband David)—know very little about the tradition of allegorical readings of Scripture through images.

As a teenager growing up in New Zealand, Aidan discovered the Bible on his own, and then was mentored by a Baptist pastor and members of his congregation. He memorized large sections of Scripture. When Aidan learned of the Orthodox tradition of making icons to express the allegorical readings of Scripture, his love for the word of God deepened.

He became Greek Orthodox, and has made art for Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox churches in at least 25 countries. My husband David once assisted Aidan paint frescoes in a private chapel belonging to then-Prince Charles of England.

At Scala’s 2023 conference at Princeton Theological Seminary, Aidan lectured on the topic of “Liturgical Art as Prophecy and Priesthood.” Recovering the iconographic tradition is about much more than art. Without a vision, the people perish, Aidan insisted, drawing on Proverbs 29.

During that same visit to Princeton, Aidan sat down in the video studio with me and Jonathan Pageau , an icon carver, writer, and podcaster whose work on symbolic meanings has reached countless people.

As the three of us discussed icons of the Transfiguration, I realized even more how sacred art helps restore in our hearts the sense that God’s grace is not merely about healing us from sin (as much as I need that!). Sacred art draws us into the mystery of God’s love, lifts us up, and allows us to experience God’s glory radiating through the material world into our inner being.

Mary, the Mother of God, knew very well that our sacred callings require discernment. In this conversation with Aidan, he discusses themes from his book Festal Icons, which looks at traditional ways the Annunciation to Mary by the Angel Gabriel has been depicted, highlighting her not as a passive vessel but as actively listening for God’s word and responding in obedience, with joy and hope, to the will of God.

Icons: Living or Dead?

Why do Catholics and Orthodox pray to dead people like saints? A Pentecostal student told me that a church historian who identifies as a Reformed Christian recently answered that question by telling her, “Because they don’t believe the people depicted are dead. The saints are alive in heaven.”

The misperceptions about icons are not new; what seems new to me is the keen insight of people like UK journalist Mary Harrington, who, in her review of my book, noted many reasons why icons of Mary are particularly speaking to reverts to Christianity like her and many, many others right now.

Harrington’s remarks inspired my husband David to write two articles on his Way of Beauty Substack about the connections between early church understandings of Mary’s active cooperation with God’s will and the debates about the veneration of images in the church, which are, in fact, deeply connected.

The Way of Beauty

When Mary Calls, It Is Surprising Who Hears

Earlier this month, Mary Harrington devoted her popular newsletter to a book she says she did not expect to land on her doorstep. The book was When Mary Calls: Surprising Encounters with the Mother of God by Princeton Theological Seminary professor Margarita Mooney Clayton. Harrington’s review carried the title “The Icons Are Coming Alive Again,”. It is…

Read more

2 months ago · 15 likes · 1 comment · David Clayton

My instinct, confirmed by Harrington’s response to my book and by every single person to whom I’ve ever shown one of Aidan’s icons, is that beautiful sacred art will help people to know Mary as a living person, and increase their desire to thank God for such a beautiful spiritual mother whose love reaches us from heaven.

The Way of Beauty

Why Devotion to Mary Is Necessary if We Are to Preserve the Faith and Evangelize the Culture

In a recent posting I wrote about Mary Harrington’s review of my wife Margarita’s new book, When Mary Calls: Surprising Encounters with the Mother of God and in particular about the connection she drew between the purging of images at the Reformation and the long decline of Marian devotion that followed. Harrington sensed that the two belonged together…

Read more

a month ago · 13 likes · 1 comment · David Clayton

This Glory Can Be Yours

If you are new to icons specifically, or new to sacred art entirely, I suggest simply having one icon of Mary and Jesus in your home. Let your gaze rest on the image. You don’t have to ask for a miracle, nor speak any specific words, or any words at all. Treat Mary and Jesus pictured in your home as you would a picture of your family. They are your family.

Regardless of whether or not you already love icons or just want to take the first step, look at Aidan’s amazing website where you can find out how to study with him, read his articles, gaze at his work on the screen, purchase a print of his work, or even commission an icon for your church.

I particularly encourage my readers in the UK to order When Mary Calls today. If you already own my book, consider giving it to someone else as a gift.

ORDER WHEN MARY CALLS

You can be a patron of Aidan’s work through his Patreon program, where monthly donations from as little as 2.50 GBP a month will ensure you will never have a day devoid of sacred beauty.

YES-I'LL SUPPORT AIDAN!

More Coming Soon from the UK

I’ve recently arrived in the UK, where I’ll be recording interviews about the book with The Catholic Truth Society and The Spectator (UK). I’ve also had the chance to meet Mary Harrington personally, and to discuss CS Lewis and Mary with Rev. Dr. Michael Ward, the world’s leading scholar of Lewis, who is based in Oxford. I’m grateful to Blackfriars Hall at Oxford University, where I started the research for this book and for their commitment to integrating beauty, truth and virtue in their work and lives.

And I’m visiting Aidan’s studios again in Shropshire, and I’ll post some notes about the beauty I find there!

In-Person and Live Stream Event on June 10

Come see me in person in Washington, DC on June 10th at 6 pm at the Catholic Information Center, or register to watch the livestream! Hint: I’ll share how I learned from my mentor, the African-American scholar of religion Albert Raboteau, why remembering Mary at the foot of the cross gives insights into not only the meaning of compassion but also creativity.

If there’s time, I hope to also explain why Mary’s unexpected calls are responding to the need for authentic community and (small c) catholicity—universal truths we all embrace which allow our particular gifts to shine.

ORDER WHEN MARY CALLS

Recurring Questions

Thanks to video interviews with Tammy Peterson and Eric Metaxas, and an appearance on nationally syndicated radio—thousands of people, if not more than a million people—have heard me answer questions such as:

• Why are seekers, Protestants, and fallen-away Catholics returning home to Christ and his church through Mary?

• Why do those who believes in the Bible and loves Jesus need to know Mary?

• Why did I, a life-long Roman Catholic, write this book about Mary as a mix of personal stories, memoirs and theological reflections?

• How is the renewed interest in liturgical worship (including sacred art and music) related to love of Mary?

If you look at the some of the critical or dismissive comments on this YouTube video, you will see I am not preaching to the choir. In fact, I hope I’m not preaching at all. I hope, as I told Eric Metaxas and his listeners, I want this book to remind all Christians that they are called to know Mary personally as their mother. Eric admitted in this interview that he has had a resurgent interest in Mary as the result of a vision his father had of Mary when he was dying.

Won’t we know Jesus better if we also know his mother? If Jesus loved Mary does it make sense for us to ignore her or belittle her? Should we expect young people to embrace the risk of motherhood if we forget the Mother of God?

Subscribe now

Ecumenical Restoration Through Mary

Reviewing my book on her popular Substack, UK-based philosopher and journalist Mary Harrington pronounced: “The Icons are Coming Alive Again.”

Mary Harrington

The Icons Are Coming Alive Again

A young man experiences healing at a holy well in Ireland; Our Lady of Guadaloupe speaks to a young pregnant woman through “a tear in the world”, saving her life. An artist finds his way from a secular upbringing, through 12 years of monastic life, to lay married life as an icon painter. A composer reframes artistic creativity through the story of the Annunciation…

Read more

3 months ago · 122 likes · 29 comments · Mary Harrington

“Once a central figure of Christian iconography, the veneration of Mary became deprecated in the great religious upheaval of the Reformation and is now viewed as a bit odd unless you’re Catholic or Orthodox. But over recent years I’ve come to feel, increasingly strongly, that the ‘mother shaped blind spot’, a central theme in my writing, is deeply bound up with [Mary’s] disappearance from mainstream Anglophone culture….

[WHEN MARY CALLS] is a gentle, careful work of ecumenical restoration, whose author is both courageous and vulnerable in offering her own relationship with Mary, as a prism through which to refract other stories. If you are looking for a nourishing, ecumenical, and accessible resource for reflection on Mary—and perhaps through her—there may be gifts for you in this book.”

—Mary Harrington, journalist and author of Feminism Against Progress

I posted on her comments section:

“I reflect praise for the book to where I hope my book on Mary directs people: to greater knowledge of God’s merciful love which was manifested in the world through the Jesus taking the form of human flesh in the womb of Mary... I hope to invite people to a simply posture of stating, or rather asking with wonder, as Elizabeth did, “Why am I so favored that the Mother of my Lord should come to me?” (Luke 1:43).

If Only We Knew Our Faith Better

I’m grateful to Ashley McGuire and Betsy Fentress for publishing a transcript of their interview with me for Catholic Conversations. How I hope both Catholics and Protestants read my book and this interview—if only we knew how much we share!

Catholic Conversations with TCA

Our Lady of the Unexpected: Mary's Mantle Covers the World

by Ashley McGuire and Betsy Fentress…

Read more

3 months ago · 5 likes

My Debut Leading Music and Prayer at the National Cathedral in DC

Most of us intuitively know that music and art can bring us to a posture of loving attention. When Anne Snyder, Editor-in-Chief of Comment Magazine, invited me to lead morning devotions about Mary on May 29 and 30, 2026, at the National Cathedral in DC as part of a 3-day festival called “Understory”, I dreamed about how I could integrate Scripture, art and music as I introduced Mary to a mostly Protestant crowd of 1,000 people (though registration for my sessions was limited to under 100 to keep it intimate).

For more than a year, I’ve been taking voice lessons, hoping to be a better choir member and a causal singer at friendly gatherings. Now I saw my chance for a debut as a leader of church music in a magnificent cathedral that rivals some of the best in Europe! I worked hard with my voice teacher to rehearse two Marian hymns of praise, the Salve Regina and the Regina Coeli, which I sang at the end of morning prayer sessions that largely followed the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. To my delight, those gathered, stood, knelt, and prayed together the psalms and also sang together the two Marian hymns which I led.

What if we began each and every day in a posture of loving attention to the Word of God, illuminated by the art and music which help us make connections across revelation and receive insights into our own personal callings?

Mary is Near

Perhaps the most common reaction I’ve gotten is deeply personal: countless stories of Mary’s compassion, protection, intercession and loving presence have poured out as hymn of praise to God’s ongoing mysterious and miraculous presence among us.

Whether you are far or near from me, I hope you know that Mary is near you, drawing you to Christ and his church, showing you just how much you are loved and just how great your calling is.

Order When Mary Calls

Today, June 2, 2026, MacMillan’s latest composition, entitled Angels Unawares premieres in London. Working through our senses, this oratorio Angels Unawares leads people into a space of contemplation where we can experience the mystery of our existence and respond to our personal callings with faith and service. I hope that this new oratorio, and MacMillan’s beautiful music about Mary we discuss in my book, invite broad audiences of seekers and people of faith alike to re-encounter traditional Christian themes of trust in God and compassion for the stranger.

MacMillan sees the music he writes as a chance to reach people who are searching to connect their spiritual longings to a religious tradition. As MacMillian explains in my book on Mary, the Christian view of creativity stands above what MacMillan calls the “transient fashions and banalities of the culture of today.” Christianity, he explains, must be incarnational: as Christ took flesh in Mary’s womb, along with Mary, we are called to be vessels of the grace of the Incarnation, infusing the divine spirit into matter.

Subscribe now

“Catholicism has always meant a lot to me,” MacMillan said. “But in those early days I couldn’t see any way of allowing the religious dimension into the practice of my music, and, of course, those who flattered themselves that they were at the cutting edge of this particular art form would say that there was no place for something as reactionary and anachronistic as the Catholic faith in the modern artistic world.”

Abraham’s Hospitality to Angels

Angels Unawares challenges us all—whether seekers or regular religious practitioners—to ask ourselves what we make of Biblical stories of angels.

Imagine you’re a nomad in the desert, trying to protect your household in a harsh land. Three strangers are approaching your compound. What do they want? What do you do?

If you are Abraham of the Bible, because you are steadfastly obedient to God in his wisdom and mercy, you rush out to welcome them into your home. You offer them water, bread, milk, a freshly prepared calf, and a cool place to rest during their journey. And then these three unfamiliar figures deliver a message from God: that you and your wife Sarah, far advanced in years, are going to have a child.

Commenting on this story from Genesis, St. Paul would write: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares” (Hebrews 13:2).

Named for this passage, Sir James MacMillan’s new oratorio Angels Unawares premiers today, June 2, 2026 in London. The composition sets to music twelve poems by the late Richard Willis that call our attention to surprising encounters with angels in the Bible. Abraham’s loving attention to strangers encapsulates MacMillan’s aim with this piece: to enrapture our attention through music so we may be transformed by the presence of the divine within us and respond with greater love for others.

“At its core it is an encouragement to show kindness to strangers as a spiritual discipline, an appeal to treat all individuals with dignity and compassion, recognising that every encounter with another person could carry a deeper (even supernatural) significance than it appears on the surface. There is an added layer of mystery to the verse, implying that angels might be present in everyday life, unnoticed,” MacMillan told me.

“There are many people in today’s world who are fascinated and beguiled by the idea of angels,” he said. “And they run like a significant theme throughout the Judeo-Christian legacy.”

As MacMillan said, “the curiosity for many seekers is that these unexpected, mysterious things that happen to have a deeper implication, both supernatural and ethical. We are being called to enter into a deeper sense of compassion in our daily lives, and that compassion comes from a deeper spiritual significance. The Christian message at the heart of these angelic encounters reminds us of the desire for God, of the numinous, for us to be more kind, more forgiving in our lives.”

MacMillan’s composition is an invitation to recover that loving attention to God’s active dwelling in each of us that inspired Abraham’s hospitality to strangers. Christianity is not primarily an ethical code of conduct, but a way of life that opens our hardened hearts to receive God’s loving gifts and respond in kind.

Here is a recording of this piece from its world premiere, which had its world premiere at the Sistene Chapel in the Vatican earlier in 2026.

Christian Mysticism and Ethical Action

As Jacques Maritain, a twentieth-century Catholic philosopher, wrote in his magnum opus The Degrees of Knowledge, mystical contemplation of God is the basis of truly ethical action. Because of human sinfulness, only through an encounter with God do our actions become motivated by love. Christian mysticism and Christian ethics were never meant to be separated.

In the modern world, however, too often people want to harness the power of the mysterious or the spiritual for their own ends. This is a mistake. Mystical encounters are not meant to center ourselves or draw us out of the world; rather, they refresh our bodies and souls to encounter others in deeper ways.

After the opening line from St. Paul, the oratorio proceeds chronologically through Scripture. Not all encounters with the spiritual world are benevolent: the first story we hear about is Eve’s temptation by an evil spirit that led to humanity’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. This is followed by Abraham’s hospitality.

Next, Old Testament visions of Angels—from Jacob’s ladder to Elijah and Ezekiel—stoke our imagination, guiding us to wonder about the still small voices that suggest we too might hear from God. When, like Elijah, have we felt a still small voice moving us to greater love and hope?

Mary’s Encounter with an Angel Challenged Her

The New Testament passages open with Mary’s encounter with the angel Gabriel, which startled her and challenged her. Mary was troubled by the angel’s words, “you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus.” (Luke 1:31) This was not a plan she had for herself, and she didn’t understand it. But she consented, saying, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” (Luke 1:38)

Despite her great call, Mary didn’t draw attention to herself. Rather she ran to be at the side of her cousin Elizabeth, who had conceived a child in her old age (John the Baptist).

None of us will be asked to do what Mary was. But any of us, if we listen, may be challenged by a message from God.

Wrestling with Powers of Darkness

Christ was not free of temptation, wrestling with powers of darkness in the wilderness. New Testament figures Nathanael and Mary of Magdala are recalled for their visions of angels, who led them to recognize Christ as their savior. Peter was so dramatically freed from prison by angels that the guard was tempted to kill himself but instead embraced Christian baptism.

Angels Unawares ends with John’s visions in Revelation remind us that the spiritual battle, though won eternally by Christ, continues in this world. Yet, we are meant to be comforted, indeed protected, by the woman in Revelation 12 who crushes the head of the serpent—an allegorical image of Mary.

A Musical and Catholic Revival Coming from Scotland?

Born into a secularizing, impoverished area of Scotland in 1963, how is it that a composer, and a man of deep Catholic faith like MacMillan is now bringing to the UK a resounding invitation to hear music of angels?

Today, many young people in the UK are raised with no exposure to the beauty of Christianity. In my studies in sociology, when the topics of art and beauty were raised, we were expected to scorn the religious inspirations behind works of art and music as if those motivations or any high ideals cover up the so-called “true” desires for power, domination, or subversion. Has the tide of secularism now shifted in the United Kingdom and in the arts world?

Order When Mary Calls

In remarks given in Italy in 2002, Pope Benedict XVI stated that “the radiance of the beauty we contemplate opens the soul to the mystery of God.” A true encounter with beauty, Benedict XVI adds, must lead to a readiness for sacrifice, not desire for power; to self-giving, not possession.

Perhaps that’s why MacMillan’s music, and increasingly the Catholic faith behind his work, continue to spark curiosity among large audiences in his native UK and among the millions who have listened to his work on YouTube or Spotify. MacMillan has grown more confident in asserting that he believes his work is divinely inspired, which led one journalist to declare that idea was so avant-garde that it is countercultural. He embraced the term, now describing his music as part of “a brave radical countercultural vision…to attempt to resynchronize the world around us.”

As I’ve noted in my new book, When Mary Calls: Unexpected Encounters with the Mother of God, traditional Christian practices like pilgrimages and veneration of images of saints and Mary—practices once proscribed by Henry VIII’s 1538 injunction, given by Thomas Cromwell—have seen a resurgence of interest from Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, and other Protestants in the United Kingdom.

In his comments on my book, Jonathan Pageau, an icon carver, public speaker, YouTuber, editor of the Orthodox Arts Journal, and host of The Symbolic World blog and podcast wrote that:

“As the shadow of secularism passes over us, an increasing multitude of people wish to experience a deep connection with God and experience His presence in creation. When Mary Calls will help us remember Mary as both the Mother of God and our own mother. Margarita Mooney Clayton shows us the many ways Mary guides us to the embodiment of her Son.”

I sincerely hope that many people who hear MacMillan’s work Angels Unawares or his rousing music about Mary, or his music for the liturgy, will be filled with the most real yet most elusive, mysterious sense of being seen by angels, embraced by a loving God, and will stand up, walk out, pick up the Gospels, go to a beautiful Sunday liturgy, and dedicate their lives to compassionate service.

ORDER WHEN MARY CALLS

In this recently released interview with Tammy Peterson, which has 22K views on YouTube in less than a week since it was posted, we move slowly through the seven stories (including hers) that are the heart of the book.

I love how the YouTube thumbnail Tammy put up simply states: “Mary is Real.”

I have to admit that I looked at the comments on YouTube with some trepidation, as I know this topic generates strong opinions. But to my delight, when people expressed the typical concerns about Marian beliefs and devotions, they were met by faithful Christians who quoted Scripture, the church fathers, and church teachings.

But what struck me was that the truth of those teachings resonated with many deep personal experiences people have had with Mary. Mary is a person we can relate to in a variety of ways, trusting in her not to lead us astray.

An important part of this project for me was understanding and defending the love of Mary using Scripture, the church fathers, church history, church teachings, liturgical prayers, hymns, and icons of Mary. I buried myself in the library, then agonized until I realized I didn’t need to write a book summarizing all the sources I'd read. I could, if I wanted to, answer every single concern or objection about Mary by drawing on Scripture and tradition. Anyone who wants to know more can jump to the appendix of my book to find great resources and start reading.

But I want people to read stories like Tammy’s so they can see Mary is really present today. When she was facing a life-threatening illness, a Catholic friend taught (then non-Christian) Tammy to pray the rosary, leading her through the Scripture verses that go with each decade of Our Fathers and Hail Marys. In my private conversations with Tammy Peterson, which are now published in my book, Tammy stated clearly, “Mary led me to Christ, and Christ led me to the Church.”

Tammy was seeking God fervently, but she needed to be formed so she could receive more light. Although the rosary certainly expresses love for Mary, the formative power of the rosary is that its prayers order our attention to the life of Christ in the Gospels from the Annunciation to his glorious resurrection. When documents like Pope Paul VI’s 1974 letter Marialis Cultus talk about devotion to Mary being subordinate to Christ, that does not mean love of Mary lessens our love for Christ, but rather, love of Mary is meant to bind us to Christ and his church, as it did for Tammy.

Perhaps we can think of the formative power of prayers like the rosary and other devotions to Mary like hiking up a mountain. Climbing a mountain to hear God speak has deep Biblical resonances. Moses heard God’s word on a mountaintop. Christ ascended a mountain at the Transfiguration, so filled with light that the disciples fell to the ground.

When I visited Tammy in Arizona, I followed her quick steps up Camelback Mountain. The view got wider, and my sense of anticipation for anything and everything was heightened. At the edge of earth and sky, creation seemed miraculous.

I’m keenly aware that the ability to achieve any athletic feat requires daily exercise. This is especially true for me since I was injured by being hit by a car when walking across the street nearly seven years ago; now I have to work out regularly just to avoid pain. Humans are a unity of body and soul, and our hearts and our intellects need to be formed as much as our bodies.

We are all fallen and in need of grace. Who among us does not need to be formed to see Christ as we should? Who has not struggled to join a church or stay in church? Who does not need guides so we continuously stick to the path we have called to follow?

As Tammy remarks in the foreword she wrote to my book When Mary Calls: “So many people in the world today are confused about what it means to be a person and to be a mother. Feminism, digital isolation, broken families, psychological pain, and fragmentation of all kinds have left many people cynical that life can be anything more than an endless competition or a series of pointless struggles…Each person’s story in this book reveals that wisdom [of Scripture] in powerful, personal ways. Most importantly, the Mother of our Lord, who is too often forgotten, is powerfully present in these pages. You will read about various ways Mary touches people, heals them, and carries them to God. This book will help you know that Mary is calling you, too.”

“Holy Mary, Mother of God…” Those powerful words from the second part of the Hail Mary are not word-for-word in Scripture. But they do point us back to the Incarnation of Christ through a human mother, and to Mary as the one whom all generations will call blessed (Luke 1:48). Such beautiful words are easy to repeat, easy to memorize, as Tammy did in the hospital years ago, freeing our hearts from fear, isolation, and doubt to ask for a clearer vision of how God’s plan for our lives.

ORDER WHEN MARY CALLS

Knowing Mary better thus allows us to explore larger questions all Christians grapple with such as: how does God’s grace work? What did the Apostle Peter mean when he said all followers of Christ “may become participants of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4)?

Each chapter of my book presents people encountering Mary, herself a vessel of the Holy Spirit at the Incarnation, as, they, too, long to to have Pentecostal moments. Those moments where we feel upheld by God’s grace strengthen our faith that deification, or sanctification, becoming partakers in the divine nature, is a possibility for each and every person.

Acts 1:14 names Mary as being present in the upper room while the disciples awaited the coming of the Holy Spirit. Images such as this one by Jean Restout visually illustrate Mary’s central presence at the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles.

ORDER WHEN MARY CALLS

A Student’s Reflections on Mary at Pentecost

The very first time I taught a course on Mary to my mostly Protestant students at Princeton Theological Seminary, a young man named Kyle Barton said he thought knowing more about Mary’s life of grace would help him understand in how the early church understood deification.

For one of his class assignments, Kyle studied Cardinal Rainero Cantalamessa’s Mary, Mirror of the Church. Born in Italy, and having studied theology in Fribourg, Switzerland, and classical literature in Milan, Italy, Cantalamessa served for 12 years as a member of the Catholic Commission for dialogue with the Pentecostal churches. He was appointed preacher to the Papal Household by Pope Saint John Paul II, a position he also held under Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis.

Cantalamessa: Mary is a Mirror of the Church

Kyle, who is now continuing his theological studies as a PhD student at Baylor University, wrote a fantastic introduction to Cantalamessa’s book, which I quote here:

“In Mary, Mirror of the Church Raniero Cardinal Cantalamessa presents a series of reflections on the scriptural witness to Mary as a path to practical holiness. As the title indicates, Cantalamessa views Mary as a mirror of the church. All Christians are to see an image of their own calling to faithful discipleship reflected in her experiences. Though her role in salvation history is unique—for no other human is elected to be Theotokos—her experiences, in principle, are not unrepeatable. She is a map that God gives us for our own pilgrimage to practical holiness, and if we know how to read her correctly, a clear path forward will open for the church.

While the New Testament mentions Mary only a few times, Cantalamessa believes these references are strategic and of great significance, containing clues to the crux of the Christian life. As Cantalamessa points out numerous times, only Mary was present at all three events that form the heart of the Christian mystery—the incarnation, the crucifixion, and Pentecost. Like a small glimmer of gold in a mine, these references, though scant, should signal to believers the riches available here if they just started digging. Contemplating Mary’s place in these mysteries elucidates the mysteries of our own pilgrimage of faith, for here a human vessel participates in the great events that comprise salvation—the union of divinity and humanity, the defeat of death and removal of sin, and the birth of the church through the reception of the Holy Spirit.

To be a Christian is to know these mysteries experientially, and thus to be a Christian is to follow in Mary’s footsteps no less than it is to follow in Abraham’s. Cantalamessa’s conviction is that God speaks to us through Mary’s life, and though the Scriptures do not present her as loquacious, she is in fact ‘pregnant with the Word,’ so that ‘the few words and verses referring to her in the Gospels are extraordinarily charged with meaning and resonance.’“

Reading Kyle’s full paper, linked to here with his gracious permission, will certainly delight you as much as it did me!

Barton Mary, Mirror Of The Church

133KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Cantalamessa writes and speaks about Mary, as do I, with the hope that, as she did at Pentecost, she will serve as a source of unity, helping Catholics and Protestants encounter the Scriptures anew.

Mary and the Gospel of Grace

The title of my book, When Mary Calls, attempts to capture the reality I encountered: many people from a variety of Christian backgrounds, or no particular religious background, are experiencing Mary’s presence in their lives, calling them to a life of holiness, of seeking to walk in God’s grace.

I wrote my book for seekers as well as those who already know Mary well, or only known a little. I’m inspired to do what Cantalamessa describes as presenting “the Christian life through preaching the gospel of grace…in a kerygmatic way [a passionate proclamation of the Gospel of our salvation[, certain that it has an intrinsic power.” I do not discard dogmas as somehow irrelevant, but I focus on the transformative life experiences which give those dogmas meaning.

As Cantalamessa writes, “When Scripture is the basis, the starting point is God’s Word, and in expounding its meaning, the dogma is reached as the true interpretation given by the Church. This is the way truth came down to us.”

Mary’s presence at Pentecost reminds us that we are not meant to journey towards God alone, but with the church. Cantalamessa writes, “Mary is a mirror of the Church in two ways: to reflect the light she herself receives as a mirror does with the light of the sun. And because she is such that the Church can and must mirror herself in Mary to make herself beautiful for her heavenly spouse.”

Yes, Mary was the First Pentecostal

After going through each chapter of the book, Kyle reaches a profound conclusion that can be drawn from meditating upon Mary’s presence at Pentecost. As he wrote in his essay for my class “Ecumencial Devotion to Mary”,

“Chapter 8 brings us directly to Pentecost, where Cantalamessa christens Mary ‘the first pentecostal’ in the church. A striking parallel is sketched between Mary’s experience in Luke 1 and the church’s experience in Acts 1. In both instances, the Spirit comes upon individuals who then proclaim the great things that God has done. Mary becomes a type of the church as ‘a living organism, irrigated and animated by the Holy Spirit’ through both sacraments and charisms. Most interesting here is how Mary becomes an example of ‘the free and unpredictable action of God’s Spirit,’ who works ‘outside the instituted channels’ of the church’s hierarchical structure. Mary’s experience teaches us to look to a God who ‘intervenes explosively… to renew a tradition and a cult that have become simple routine and formalism.’

Chapter 9 is on the Johannine Pentecost—’he bowed is head and give up his Spirit.’ While Luke emphasizes the Spirit’s power in the church’s mission, John emphasizes the Spirit’s presence in the church’s life. Mary teaches us that no matter how much God has used us in the past, we are always in need of ‘new and successive effusions of the Holy Spirit’ and that many times Pentecost ‘takes place beneath the cross.’

Cantalamessa has given us a rich meditation on Mary as an example of the path of discipleship. There is much here that Protestants can appreciate. Although Cantalamessa does not skirt the Marian dogmas, he goes out of his way to be conciliatory and to be sensitive to his Protestant siblings’ consternations and grievances. When he unavoidably must present Mary’s premier role and titles per Catholic teaching, he reasons at length to make them intelligible, admits that they have been sometimes taken to wrong extremes, and even a few times does not insist that all have to follow this path. After explaining how believers, like John, are to take Mary into their lives—one of the more devotionally radical teachings of the book—he then concedes that ‘this kind of life with Mary is not the only and necessary way to be imposed on everyone.’ He longs that Mary would become a source of unity in the church, not division.”

Part of the assignment for class was to imagine how a book about Mary would reach Protestants.

Kyle wrote: “Would this approach appeal to Protestants? I think so. It is a serious, engaging, and heartfelt plea to learn from Mary to whatever extent the Spirit calls one. There are resources in these pages that could spawn numerous Protestant Bible studies and sermons. Protestants do well to listen attentively and follow where they can.

Cantalamessa showcases the value of a devotional approach ‘from below,’ sourced in Scripture. I was truly surprised by the mileage he got out of this approach, especially when put into conversation with the whole canon of Scripture powered by a typologically rich hermeneutic. This is a book I will be returning to and recommending to my fellow Protestants who are looking to reflect more deeply on the lessons that Mary’s life can teach us. And for those Protestants who are not yet able to call Mary Mother, maybe they can start with Mirror.”

Cantalamessa’s book presents a challenge, or maybe better put, an adventure, that Kyle was willing to take up. After we consider something in Mary’s life, we must ask ourselves, what does this mean for us? We must not just be hearers of the Word, but doers, as Mary herself was.

Our Response to the Holy Spirit

As Cantalamessa puts it: “Mary teaches us to say yes to God with freedom, joy, and passion.” Mary calls us towards God, and, if we allow her, she will teach us to be good disciples, as she certainly did in the upper room at Pentecost and for the early Christian church.

Mary’s quiet presence at Pentecost, and her often silent presence at other places in Scripture, including the Nativity and the Cross, is pregnant with meaning. Perhaps, with Mary at our side, we can look anew at the Scriptures, opening ourselves to the power of the Holy Spirit to transform us from within, moving from silent prayer to willing obedience to God’s calls.

ORDER WHEN MARY CALLS

ORDER WHEN MARY CALLS

All of us inevitably must confront death—our own and that of our loved ones. My book reflects on what Mary’s spiritual motherhood meant to me, a woman who did not marry until I was 48, when I lost a student who I loved like a spiritual son. John was born 33 years ago today, on April 23, 1993. Tragically, he died of cancer on May 3rd, 2019.

When I went with John to his last Mass on earth, he cried out, “Mary, help us all!” I believe Mary welcomed him home to God the Father, just as I believe she did for Eric Metaxas’s father, and so many others who have experienced mystical encounters with Mary.

To celebrate John’s amazing life, I wanted to share the eulogy to John I gave at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City at his funeral Mass held on May 7th, 2019. A few paragraphs of the eulogy I believe were divinely inspired—I woke up in the middle of the night with important words I needed to add to clarify that John faced his death with hope. I couldn’t sleep again, so I conversed with Mary and Jesus for hours, simply repeating the rosary prayers, until the sun came up.

Exhausted but convicted, I clutched a rosary as I walked up the steps to the alar at St. Patrick’s, pausing to bow before the tabernacle. I stood at the podium and spoke the most heart-wrenching, yet hopeful, words I’ve ever spoken in front of a packed cathedral of John’s mourning friends and family. On the way back to my seat, I laid my head and my rosary on John’s coffin and let the tears flow like a river.

Now, I share once again my final conversations with John, a bittersweet reminder that spiritual motherhood is a beautiful gift God gave a woman like me who longed for biological children but never received them. My personal life has shown me the many ways God makes that which appears barren to be fertile.

I hope you read this eulogy, and read When Mary Calls, and remember that Mary is your mother, too. I hope you allow Mary to walk with you, as John and I did, as you pass through the valley of tears in this life on your pilgrimage towards the New Jerusalem.

A Eulogy for John Aroutiounian

The last time I saw John Aroutiounian was Sunday, April 7^th. We met at Big Daddy’s, a 1950s diner on Broadway. John’s cancer was well advanced by that time, but he didn’t want to talk about his illness. So we talked about politics, we talked about our favorite music, and I unburdened on him some of my own personal concerns.

When the food came, John was so sick he could barely eat. I could see his energy disappearing fast. They brought the bill and John reached for his wallet. When I told him to put his wallet away, he got mad. He was a person for others. Generous to an heroic degree. The creditor in almost every relationship.

Easter was just a couple of weeks away, and John had told me not long before, with a sparkle in his eyes, that if he felt better, he was going to hop on a plane to the Holy Land—Jerusalem—for Easter. But as his suffering worsened rapidly, he looked at me that day and said, “Margarita, I’m not going to make it to Jerusalem for Easter. I may not make it to Easter at all.”

As I said goodbye to him that day, he was in terrible pain, but he called out to me, saying that he was so happy I had come over, and he thanked me for being there with him. As I walked out the door, he shouted three times that he loved me.

We pray that John has now finished the pilgrimage of life to the heavenly Jerusalem where he celebrates the fulfillment of all Jesus accomplished on Easter.

I have had the joy to write several letters of recommendation for John since I met him during my time on the faculty at Yale. He made it so easy to praise him to others. He had some huge accomplishments, like winning the tough but friendly competition to be speaker of the prestigious Yale Political Union. But his erudition and passion were surpassed by his compassion, serving as a suicide hotline counselor and as a freshmen counselor at Yale’s Jonathan Edwards College.

John and I worked together to organize a variety of student groups, first at Yale and then through a nonprofit I started called Scala, that focused on integrating intellectual and personal development. John keenly wanted to imbibe everything he did with a spirit of friendship and community. More than just a student of mine and a collaborator, I thought of John like a son, someone with whom I could share intellectual jousting but also the ups and downs, joys, and sorrows and big questions of life.

In God’s providential plan, I had scheduled to have dinner with John in New York in January 2018, on the day he received his cancer diagnosis. His body didn’t really show signs of illness until almost a year later. John chose to suffer quietly, without a lot of attention. John was a self-giver. He wanted to care for others. He didn’t want the spotlight on himself.

It was very hard, but also an honor, to watch him suffer so much. When I visited him in the hospital on March 24, we wept together over his pain and fears about his earthly end. When our tears dried, we talked about a subject he had broached several times since he received his diagnosis: that suffering can be redemptive. If somehow God was going to allow John to die so young, John believed firmly that his suffering would not be in vain. Jesus once said in the Gospel, “No one takes my life from me. I freely lay it down” (Jn 10:18). John likewise willingly offered his life, in the prime of his life, to God for the good of others.

I was blessed to one of the few people near John in his final weeks on earth. In one of my last emails to him, I told him that in seeing his so body sick, I simultaneously saw more clearly why so many people loved him: he had a soul and heart that desired truth, beauty, goodness and the infinite. As his sufferings grew, his faith grew, and therefore his natural ability to love others expanded as well.

John desired great things. When we were talking about some of them, I suggested to him that those desires were the sign of God’s image in him. We long for the transcendent, and that helps give unity and grandeur to the beautiful things of the world and lifts our human loves up to a sacred level. John smiled, because in some ways, I think, he recognized it to be autobiographical: John knew how to unite the human and the sacred, and he did that most powerfully through the way he embraced his own cross. It made him better, not bitter.

Suffering, he shared, doesn’t rob us of our grandeur; rather, when lived well, it prepares us for grandeur by breaking our sense of control and our self-centeredness. Suffering does this by turning our attention to our dependence on God, which rather than diminishing us, ennobles us.

Not long before he died, he told me how much he loved liturgy. To worship God, John said, was the most human thing we can do because to be in the presence of our Creator fulfills the deepest desires of our humanity. I went to Mass with John on March 31st. He was suffering so much that he could barely walk or stand. But he was there, worshipping God with all he could muster. It moved me to tears.

As he approached the end, I wrote in my journal that although I feared he was dying, his life would always bea sign to me of the dignity of every human person, and how his big dreams were a sign of the great things we are called to become even as and after our bodies waste away.

I finished the entry with a prayer expressing the hope that comes from the depth of the Christian faith we shared: “John, I will see you again in heaven and call you by name. And we shall worship together again at the throne of our Creator, Lord and Redeemer.”

In the last few months of his life, when his medical diagnosis was grim, when it appeared science couldn’t save him, I joined John and his loved ones in praying for a miracle down to the last moment of his life. I didn’t want John to die! John had so many things, so many people to live for! He loved so many people!

But, I believed that if God didn’t grant the miracle we were all asking for, John had accepted his innocent suffering as a kind of martyrdom, an offering of love, an act of obedience even. Through John’s love and obedience, the willing sacrifice of his life on earth, I firmly believe that God will work even greater miracles in this world.

And I hope that, when my earthly life comes to its end, I will imitate John’s courage and faith. Like he did on earth the last time I saw him, when it’s time to go home to the heavenly Jerusalem, I believe that John will call out, not just to me, but to all of us who loved him, telling us he loves us, and saying how happy and grateful he is that we have come to be with him.

Remembering John Aroutiounian

These remarks, and other conversations I had with John as he approached his death with grace and hope, will be shared in a future volume of writings from John’s friends being prepared by his family. Some of John’s writings on politics, faith and culture were published in the book Finding Gold in the Dark: Reflecting on Modern America, Virtue and Faith.

John was with me from the birth of Scala in 2016, helping me develop its vision and put together its first summer program. Here is John’s testimony from when he participated in (and helped to organize) Scala’s first summer seminar in 2017, held at Oxford University and Ampleforth Abbey, UK.

ORDER WHEN MARY CALLS

In less than three weeks, on May 5, 2026, my book on Mary will be officially released! If you like, you can pre-order When Mary Calls: Surprising Encounters with the Mother of God now and be sure to have it before Mother’s Day.

I’ve been invited to share about the book in New York City on April 22, and in Washington DC on May 29 and 30 and then again in DC on June 10 (both in person and live streamed). See below for details on those events! And stay tuned for the release of already-recorded interviews about the book with my friends Tammy Peterson (who wrote a foreward to the book and is profiled in the book), Eric Metaxas (who endorsed the book and shared a surprising story about Mary in his life in our recent interview about the book for Socrates in the Studio).

After an introduction where I discuss the trends in faith and culture that led me to write this book, I share my reflections on relying on Mary to help me navigate dangerous trips to assist political and religious dissidents in Communist Cuba. Plough magazine published an excerpt from that piece, and you can come hear me discuss that experience on April 22, 2026, in New York.

I’m immensely grateful to the other six people whose memoirs are the backbone of an exploration of Mary’s spiritual presence in our troubled times, leading people from fear to hope, from confusion to light, from loneliness to the church. Jonathan Pageau, icon carver and host of the Symbolic World podcast wrote, “As the shadow of secularism passes over us, an increasing multitude of people wish to experience a deep connection with God and experience His presence in creation. hen Mary Calls will help us remember Mary as both the Mother of God and our own mother.”

For all of those I profile in the book, regardless of where they began their faith journeys—as a seeker, a Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox Mary’s motherhood is a real presence alongside them as they seek to understand suffering and live with compassion for others, aim to co-create beautiful music and art that expresses human dignity.

On May 29 and 30, 2026, at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, I’m honored to be leading morning devotions using the Book of Common Prayer and Marian hymns and antiphons as part of The Understory, a multi-day cultural festival organized by the leaders of Comment magazine. I hope to see you there!

On June 10, 2026, both in person and live-streamed, I’ll present on the book at the Catholic Information Center in Washington, DC. A long time browser and buyer of their books, I’m thrilled to be a speaker in their lovely facility just blocks from the White House! Click here to save your spot or watch this event online.

Is Mary new to you? Don’t worry—this book is for everyone, regardless of what they do or do not know about Mary. I just ask that you read the book with an open heart, that you be willing to know Mary as a subject, a person, not merely a point of division among some Christians. (If you want to clarify doctrinal issues right away, then turn first to the detailed annotated bibliography of the book and read for yourself Scripture scholars, church historians, and doctrinal works on Mary from Orthodox, Catholics, mainline Protestants and Evangelicals.)

I want this book to help people to know Mary and to revere her through the riches of the artistic and musical traditions of the church, traditions which are being enlivened today, which can be found in the great churches that have been built that can enrich our lives and extend open up our hearts to Scripture and allow us to know Mary as a person, to hear her in the Scriptures, to see her in art, and ultimately, like the people in my book to hear her in our hearts. We honor Mary when we see her Scripture, when we gaze upon her depicted in artistic presentations of Scripture, and when raise ours voice to hers, and with hers, in prayers of praise for God’s work through her.

One further endorsement of the book came Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P., who is the Global Promoter of the rosary for the Dominican Order wrote: “As someone who learned gradually to befriend and love the Blessed Mother, these stories resonated with my own experience. Mary is truly our patient mother. I once claimed I did not need Mary, but she still quietly revealed herself to me in providential and miraculous ways. This journey led me closer to Christ because Mary always leads us closer to Christ. May these stories deepen your appreciation for Our Lady’s maternal role in your life.”

Who would not want to know better the woman who raised Jesus, the woman whose total openness to the Holy Spirit makes her the New Eve, the woman who shows that in renouncing our self-will to do the Father’s will, we can be the most generative and creative beings, changing the world from the inside out?

I encourage you to order your copy today. My hope is this book will spark conversations about forgiveness, patience, sacred art, music, and the great mysteries of the faith. I want you, the readers of this post, to know Mary if you don’t already. If you already know her, I want you to know her better every day. If you open your heart to her, Mary will help you grow in faith in God in ways that will surprise you and delight you.

When my co-panelist grabbed the microphone, he said artists should be “transgressive”, by which he explained breaking with norms of how artistic forms existed in the past.

Before I summarize that panel, let me share that I’m writing to you today because a longer form of my answer to this debate was just published by the scholarly journal New Blackfriars. This article is open-access, which means you do not have a subscription to read the article online or download it as a PDF. Read the full article in New Blackfriars here, to learn why the Catholic convert, philosopher and friend of many artists, Jacques Maritain, feared that both surrealism and romanticism had corrupted the Christian view of the artist as divinely inspired.

Subscribe now

I’m publishing this reflection on my article today, March 25th, which is the feast of the Annunciation. When I spoke on the vocation of an artist to artists gathered for the Writing the Light iconography workshop in August 2025, I directed them to a painting of the Annunciation. Mary’s willing cooperation with God’s plans for her body to become the temple of the Holy Spirit is a icon of what an artist is called to do; human cooperation with grace opens artists to divine inspiration. I contrasted that image with the contemporary idea of an artist who is a Promethean figure who steals fire from the gods but then turns his back on the gods in defiance of them. At the end of that talk, I was greeted with hugs and sighs of relief from people who had fled “transgressive” artists’ circles and who sought to use their talents to make beautiful art.

Now, back to Washington, DC, and the David Network, where I eagerly shared Scala’s mission with the room packed with young people, hoping to inspire them with the great calling to be creative in a way that learns from tradition and makes all new things shine the brilliance of the past with the best of today. Boredom, I believe, is fundamentally not knowing how to direct your passions. We can be very, very busy but existentially bored. Knowing I was speaking to future lawyers, doctors, engineers, and CEOs, I challenged them, “Do you have one hour a week to dedicate to learning and practicing something beautiful like music, art, woodwork or gardening?” I know that won’t pay most people’s bills, but it will make us happier, and it will allow us to build a beautiful culture that attracts others to our way of living in harmony with nature and God.

But how many people who call themselves artists and read my co-panelist’s writings on conservatism would self-identify as “transgressive”? The artists I work with through Scala rarely, if ever, self-identify as transgressive. My music teacher told me he would never intentionally be transgressive, as that seems to call attention to his personality, not his music. But this young Catholic convert said, if his music is different, noticeable, and even challenging that’s okay—yet he still needs to know if it is beautiful. This young man left the (dare I say boring?) world of unbelieving music halls to make music that is meaningful and sacred. Perhaps, if he transgresses in his musical practice, it’s a step towards being corrected. Or maybe, just maybe, with a few more attempts, he will pass out of the (perhaps necessary?) adolescent transgressive stage and just be a master of his craft and melt into the shadows as others journey towards God.

The world-famous artists I know such as Jonathan Pageau, Sir James MacMillan and Aidan Hart are neither boring nor transgressive. Anna Bond is a designer and board member of Scala. She co-founded Rifle Paper Co. with her husband Nathan, who is a talented musician and businessman. All of those artists make products admired by millions and bought eagerly in the free market. No one needs to teach anyone why their products are beautiful, it is self-evidently so—the great consensus is that we all want their beautiful products in our homes and churches.

When my panel concluded at the David Network, one after another young person came up to me beaming. “I’m a pianist.” “I’m an actor.” “I paint.” None of them told me they were “transgressive”. They told me they loved the message that all humans are called to co-create beauty with God, and that their love of beauty can renew culture.

If I sound like my husband David in these words, I can’t lie: he has influenced me on this topic. Shamefully, I admit that I once had the same stereotypes of artists as my co-panelist: that artists are transgressive. Perhaps that’s the ethos I imbibed as an undergraduate at Yale from plenty of clove cigarette-smoking, black clad, sad, rebellious artists of all kinds who wanted attention and approval.

My mistaken belief that artists are transgressive was major reason I canceled my first date with David. I was SURE that a self-described artist whose only credentials were math and physics degrees from Oxford University would be awfully boring, snooty, and transgressive all wrapped up in one. Thankfully, he was kind and considerate enough to re-schedule that date when, well, I got bored and wanted to take the risk to meet him.

How wrong, how dreadfully wrong, I was about David. I agreed to a second date with David because I thought I enjoyed learning from him about beauty and art. David drew me back into my own desires to co-create with God, back to my love of music.

Back to the student’s question: why do young conservatives fear being labeled as “boring”? What can be done about it? Perhaps people who proclaim that traditions matter, that social norms around sex aren’t inherently oppressive, and that hope exists in God’s providence fear being marginalized in college dining halls. But if those same conservatives invited others to a beautiful concert, to a long hike, to take an art class from a master, or to sing together, I don’t think they’d be automatically called boring.

I’ve met plenty of college students who confess to me that they are looking for someone to save their young soul from yet another transgressive “bender” of drinking, or who know their happiness doesn’t lie in bed hooking up with a stranger. Too much entertainment is boring us to death, as Neal Postman famously described. Too few conservatives dedicate their talents to making beautiful things that draw others away from the abyss of despair and towards truth, goodness and beauty.

The article I just published is my attempt to ground my views of the vocation of an artist in the scholarly work of Jacques Maritain. In popular parlance, I wrote my article in New Blackfriars to say that I do not think artists are called to be transgressive, if by that we mean in popular parlance that to be a good artist is to “free oneself from tradition” or “reject norms” or “probe the deepest abyss so we can be dark and sad” or “make myself the center of attention while I persuade you that ugliness is as awesome as a sunset.”

My Thesis

I hope I’ve persuaded you to take a few minutes to read my thesis, and if you feel so called, to read the whole paper. I know not everyone agrees with me, and I also believe that, some people incorrectly interpret Maritain’s writings on art and creativity, under-valuing his clearly Thomistic views of humans as co-creating beauty with God.

Here’s my thesis:

“The thesis of this article is that the understanding of the vocation of an artist in the writings of Jacques Maritain emerges as to develop habitus (practical virtues of the intellect) in order to direct their inspirations in order to make beautiful things that convey the spiritual heritage of the nation and the civilization and inspire others to contemplate God. This vocation to be an associate of God in creating beautiful works is a powerful reminder of the close relationship between all personal vocations and the common good.

I also write:

“In order to build a civilization of love, not one of endless absurdities, the vocation of the artist for Maritain must encompass not only communicating their own creative intuitions but also forming the receptive intuition in the hearer or the seer…Maritain concludes Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry by calling on artists to embrace their creative intuition and make objects that assist others in properly ordering their loves.”

I end my paper what is at stake in this debate. We live in a troubled world, and are looking for beauty to lead them to the truth and a good life, not ugliness or mere emotional delight masquerading as an escape from reality. As I wrote in my article:

If the societal threats the Maritains faced, Nazism and communism, no longer threaten civilization as they once did, new forms of Gnosticism that deny the full meaning of the Incarnation – the fusion of the divine and the human – reappear in philosophical, artistic, and political movements and even in theology. As Jacques Maritain well knew and warned, the vocation of the artist understood as egocentric self-expression threatens to become a dark mysticism which misdirects our collective spirit away from a unity of truth, beauty, and goodness and towards nothing but power and domination of others.

Artists create objects that we delight in when we bring those objects into the rooms of our interior castle for contemplation, a contemplation that guides our quest for personal holiness and directs our efforts for the common good of the nation and civilization. The arts are a powerful manner in which God’s presence among us is experienced as a strangeness, like a wound that pierces our hearts and opens us to an intimate friendship with our creator and sustainer.”

I hope this publication is useful to those teaching about the arts in the modern world. Too few articles, in my view, link abstract ideas about art to the human vocation to co-create with God, a vocation which certainly applies to artists.

I encourage you to not only read my piece in New Blackfriars on the vocation of an artist, but to check out all the published papers from the incredible conference that the Scala Foundation co-hosted with Blackfriars Hall and the Margaret Beaufort Institute in July 2025. I don’t recall the words “transgressive” nor “conservative” nor “progressive” every coming up in our wide-ranging discussion of theology and the arts. I’m delighted to share with you our life-giving conversations which should be intelligible to all whose eyes, ears and hearts long for beauty.

Scala was pleased to partner with the Catholic Sacred Music Project for the musical components of this event, which included choral mid-day prayer and a beautiful choral mass. Below is a recording of a choir singing Sir James MacMillan’s motet “Benedicimus tibi” at Blackfriars Hall, during Mass where Sir James was present.

DONATE TO SCALA

Never could I have imagined that, the very same week when I finally released publicly some writing about my undercover mission trips to Cuba, the island nation would be undergoing perhaps its most fragile moments since the Communist Revolution that began in 1959.

A few days ago, on March 18th, 2026, Plough magazine published the online version of my memoir of how Mary helped me have the courage to resist the Communist regime when I was searched at the border and then later followed by secret police on the streets of Cuba.

Subscribe now

I am the protagonist, the main character, in the story, but the heroes are the Cuban people who kept the faith alive amidst persecution.

A longer memoir about my experiences with Mary in Cuba will be released on May 5, 2026, by Odysseus, a new imprint of Skyhorse Publishing. The book can be pre-ordered now and will be shipped as soon as it is ready—in time for Mother’s Day 2026!

In this precarious moment in world history, Mary is appearing in unexpected places. My heart sinks every time I read the bad news coming from Cuba. Earlier this week I wrote to my friend, a sacred artist in Havana named Jose, and told him I’d be praying this prayer for him… “Santa Maria…” (Holy Mary….) I couldn’t finish my sentence. No words seemed adequate to express my concerns, but I put my trust in my mother, Mary, to finish my prayer.

I’m convinced that we do not walk alone through the valley of darkness. Nearly seven decades of communist rule in Cuba has not extinguished the faith. The worldly power that claims in public slogans “patria o muerte” (fatherland or death) had not crushed the desire for God in Cuba. I recall watching Pope Benedict XVI’s 2012 trip to Cuba. Preaching to thousands gathered in public places covered with images of el Che and Fidel Castro, the pope proclaimed emphatically, “No hay patria sin virtud!!” (There is no fatherland without virtue.)

Here are some selections from my piece in Plough, which in turn is a selection from the full piece in my forthcoming book:

“After landing in Havana, my mother and I drove through the beautiful countryside, searching for El Dolores, a sugar mill her family had operated in a village…After the Cuban Revolution, the church had been converted to a movie theater. Now the building stood vacant; its windows’ empty frames covered with wooden panels. Inside, wild grass grew on the dirt floor.

We were taken to the house of one of the lay Catholics who had not abandoned his faith. Like many in Cuba, his backyard was filled with various knickknacks and random pieces of equipment…

“Las vitrinas!” my mother exclaimed as a tarp was pulled back, revealing two stained glass windows from the church. We admired one window framed by roses. In the artwork, Mary held Jesus on her lap, surrounded by angels and shepherds who were worshiping him…

The second stained glass window spared from the iconoclasm of the Communist revolution depicted Mary standing at the foot of the cross, her hands crossed, her eyes distressed, her heart wrenched with grief…

The salty air and high winds eroded the triumphant faces of the then-still-living Fidel Castro and the long-dead Ernesto “Che” Guevara on walls and billboards across Cuba. Meanwhile, in private homes, I saw no images of Communist heroes. No one spoke of Castro or Guevara as if they were friends. Instead, Mary – depicted as Cuba’s patroness and protectress, Our Lady of Charity – reigned inside Cuban homes. Time and again, people referred to Mary as someone close to them in their struggles.”

Margarita Mooney Clayton, PhD

Founder and Executive Director, The Scala Foundation

Donate

Scala Foundation is a non-profit public charity under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code of the United States. All donations to the Scala Foundation are tax-deductible.

As Scala approaches its tenth anniversary in the summer of 2026, my husband David and I have worked hard to re-design Scala’s website. We are grateful for the artistic and technical assistance Carolyn McKinney, who leads Perceptions Studio. Carolyn also improved the look of this online magazine The Graced Imagination, as well as David’s Substack The Way of Beauty.

Since David and I married nearly four years ago, Scala’s mission has developed a unique approach to revitalizing the culture, especially in education and the arts. We will continue to host summer programs, organize public events, produce videos, conferences, books, and interviews, and conduct speaking tours.

In David’s expanded role at Scala as not only our Artist-In-Residence but also our Director of Strategic Partnerships, we are work intensively with students and families in our local community of Princeton to transform their lives through the Way of Beauty and become culture creators, entrepreneurs and leaders. Through partnerships with organizations across the United States and in the United Kingdom, we are sharing the resources we have created to expand our impact through collaborations with key partners.

Would you take a few moments to read our revised mission statement and testimonials of our impact from students, artists, educators and clergy? Please support our mission with a donation today!

Donate

Our Vision

Culture is the DNA that informs every aspect of life through which we find meaning and direction. An ugly culture breeds discontent, uncertainty, and vice. To ensure the youngest generations don’t keep getting drawn into ideological movements, we need to rebuild a beautiful culture.

Winning political arguments and passing legislation cannot replace misery with deep, abiding joy. Political advocacy — though vital — won’t provide the substance needed to live with courage, creativity, integrity, and hope.By reestablishing the architecture of traditional spiritual formation, we can transform hearts and offer hope, joy, and creativity to the world — a creativity that can inform every human activity, from the fine arts to the natural sciences. By pioneering the Way of Beauty process of formation, we have developed a model that transforms lives by cultivating habits for a lifelong practice of joy and creativity in all that we do.

Scala's New Website

Our Unique Approach

We face an epidemic of despair—the natural consequence of this widespread alienation from traditional education for divine beauty. Generations of those who have the potential to be inspired doers, thinkers, and creators of a noble culture can neither envision a future where their lives have enduring meaning nor where their work effects lasting good, leaving them vulnerable to manipulation.

The formation we provide does more than change opinions; it changes how people see themselves, empowering them to find joy, meaning, and fulfillment. We inspire people to contribute to the common good through creativity in study and work in the arts and sciences. Through this, people discover joy in the everyday labors of a family and a career.

Transforming Culture through Beauty, Creativity and Joy

Scala exists to challenge a cycle of meaninglessness. By creating paths to an encounter with true beauty – and connecting beauty to personal vocation and the common good – we are reversing the damage done to our culture by an ideology of misery, despair, and anger.

Once, all were formed to love the beautiful order which underlies all classical literature, music, the arts, and the natural sciences. But now, too many are squeezed through soulless technical training programs, pushed into embracing violent political ideologies, and abandoned to a culture of hedonism.

The Way of Beauty Formation Process

The Way of Beauty approach builds upon David’s published books, The Vision for You and The Way of Beauty, and decades of insights from mentorship and small-group fellowships. The weekly fellowship is modeled on John Wesley’s Class Meetings and other Christian fellowships. Our unique approach combines forming habits of faith, prayer, and service with commitment to creating something beautiful each week.

The Way of Beauty is the name given to a process by which we, who have been through it, discovered our true calling in life—what we call our ‘personal vocation’ and through which we discovered the Great Fact—that we have a choice in life. With God’s help, we can choose to be happy or to be miserable.

Our goal is to be happy and to become, more and more, the people God intends us to be. To this end, we aim to lead a joyful, creative, and beautiful life as we progress along the Way of Beauty.”

This is the “Way of Beauty preamble” – a statement read out at the beginning of every Way of Beauty fellowship meeting.

Through this process of spiritual formation, service, and the learning of practical skills in the pursuit of beauty, we discover our personal creative calling and contribute to society beautifully, gracefully, and joyfully, in service of God and neighbour, and for the good of all. The outcome of the Way of Beauty process of formation is to establish new habits that sustain lives of faith, carry them into any field of study or profession, and fuel inspiration and creativity, thereby promoting the common good through beauty. All of this is ordered to a life of faith and joy.

Informing and guiding all human activity, giving it purpose, meaning, and beauty, The Way of Beauty is a process of formation for people of all backgrounds, with any (or no) artistic ability. It is a Christian formation based on what was given to the great artists of the past.

Visit Scala's Website

Cultural Entrepreneurs and Educators

“Thanks to Scala’s programs and Margarita’s personal mentorship, I have found ways to integrate my intellectual work on John Henry Newman and my creative work in film-making and journalism. Scala helped me to build a community of creatives and intellectuals in both the UK and the US.” Dr. Lauren Spohn, graduate of Harvard University, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and Assistant Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Texas in Austin’s School of Civic Leadership.

“In my early attempts at being an icon carver, David Clayton was the first writer to see my potential and promote my work. His articles for the New Liturgical Movement and his blog The Way of Beauty (now on Substack), have been instrumental in rekindling liturgical art in the West. When we launched the Orthodox Arts Journal in 2012, David’s writing on The Way of Beauty and The New Liturgical Movement’s approach were our model and inspiration. His desire to present beauty, proportion, and the creative retrieval and participation in tradition as the true root of art will remain a touchstone in the cultural return to sacred art and the evangelization of the wider culture.” Jonathan Pageau, liturgical artist (see pageaucarvings.com), public speaker, and YouTuber, and noted commentator on contemporary culture; founder of The Orthodox Arts Journal and The Symbolic World podcast, magazine and online learning community.

We Are at a Crossroads

Today’s cultural entrepreneurs are fleeing the mainstream institutions in droves, but they don’t know how to use their talents for the common good. Like the Medicis, patrons of great artists of the Renaissance, with your support, we can build a network of creative leaders in many professions whose work will outlast any election cycle.

Your donation to Scala will empower people to find meaning, and fulfillment and to contribute to the common good through creativity in study and work in the arts and sciences.

The question is not whether you can afford to support Scala. The question is whether you can afford not to. Making your annual or monthly donation to Scala today will catalyze our efforts at cultural renewal.

Margarita Mooney Clayton, PhD

Founder and Executive Director, The Scala Foundation

Donate

Scala Foundation is a non-profit public charity under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code of the United States. All donations to the Scala Foundation are tax-deductible.

As we begin Lent, I wanted to share the words of my meditation to a group of students from Princeton Theological Seminary (PTS) about the importance of slowing down our minds to recall we are always in God’s presence. On Monday, February 9th, 2026, at the PTS chapel, we gathered for prayer, and I offered these words, borrowed from a book of meditations I use often, Divine Intimacy.

“Grant me, O Lord, to understand the joy and the responsibility You have given me, in communicating Your life to me: that I may die to self and live solely for Thee.”

We listened to the story of when Jesus Visits Martha and Mary, from Luke 10: 38-42.

³⁸ Now as they went on their way, he entered a village; and a woman named Martha received him into her house. ³⁹ And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching. ⁴⁰ But Martha was distracted with much serving; and she went to him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.” ⁴¹ But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things; ⁴² one thing is needful. Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her.”

Here is my reflection on this Gospel passage that I shared.

Subscribe now

When listening to these words from scripture, they can seem a bit troubling. But what appears to be the obvious message may not be the message we’re intended to receive. I’m not sure it’s so obvious that this scripture passage is meant simply to somehow help us weigh up how hard one person is working or another, or how we’re supposed to speak to others about what we think they should be doing.

When a scripture passage troubles us or seems unusual, it begs the question: what do we need to think is true about Jesus in this passage in order to make sense of what’s going on?

One of the things that this passage is inviting us to remember and, in fact, to contemplate, is that Jesus was fully human and also fully divine. We know from the Gospels that Jesus had friendships. It’s kind of incredible that God would have close friendships! Jesus’s words are not a harsh rebuke of his friend Martha. His words are more of an invitation to remember that although Christ is intimate to us and close to us, He also divine.

If Christ is divine, and He enters our midst and comes so close to us. But we’re distracted by many things—distracted to the point of calling out other people for not doing what they should be doing. Christ is saying, “What is the one thing necessary?”

We should ponder the words of a contemplative mystic, St. Teresa of Avila, whose works on mysticism and the contemplative life have inspired many saints and many writers and artists. But St. Teresa of Avila was also an incredibly active woman. She entered the Carmelite convent in Spain in 1535, during a time of crisis. Convents were falling under corruption; their life of and their rule of life wasn’t being respected. St. Teresa went on to reform existing convents, and she founded no less than seventeen religious communities. Seventeen communities!

What can take away from this passage that will help us as we begin to enter the time of Lent? If we remember that Christ is divine but has lowered himself to come as intimate to us as entering our own living rooms, one of the things we can take away from this passage is simply the realization that we often don’t see the gifts of Christ right in front of us. We are rightly worried about affairs in our home, affairs in the world, affairs being a student. But the presence of Christ amidst us, this gift, is also a calling to recognize our dignity of being sharers in the divine nature.

I brought a painting with me today, this painting over here by an artist in Havana named Jose Cortes, to remind us of the three-in-one nature of the Trinity. This image is inspired by the hospitality of Abraham. You see Sarah and Abraham who welcomed three strangers into their midst. A famous iconographer named Andre Rublev painted an icon upon which this one is based; this depiction is often thought of as portraying the Trinity, three persons in one.

This image reminds us that we are called to be hospitable, but business and distraction don’t build unity. People long for a hearth, a home, a place of sharing. In this painting, the three figures of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are gathered around a table, which symbolizes an altar. There’s a chalice on the altar, which is symbolic of the Eucharist.

When we think about this passage from scripture that we just heard, do we realize that we are called to partake of the divine life of the Trinity? And is that the one thing that is most important to us?

Jesus appreciates our work. He was a carpenter for 30. But he’s telling us that without taking that time to contemplate the divine in the world, the work that we do in the world won’t always be rooted in Christ.

St. Teresa reflected on how little we profit from the blessings God has granted us. This Scripture passage reminds us how rarely we sit at the feet of Christ to profit from the great blessing of partaking in the divine nature of Christ. Unpracticed at contemplation, our thoughts pursue their habitual paths, and quickly cease pondering the great mysteries of God’s infinite love.

“How can one be free,” St. Teresa of Avila said, “who is separated from the Most High? What harder or more miserable captivity is there than for the soul to have escaped from the hand of its Creator? Happy are those who find themselves laden with strong fetters and chains of the gifts of God’s mercy, so that they are unable to gain the power to set themselves free. O free will, thou art the slave of thine own freedom, unless thou be pierced through with fear and love for Him who created thee.”

A week and a half from now, we begin the liturgical season of Lent. Can we put aside five minutes every day for contemplative prayer? What about 15 minutes? Maybe 30 minutes?

Why is it easy to avoid the silence of contemplative prayer? It could be because, in the silence, it’s difficult to avoid thoughts about the self. St. Teresa counsels us that contemplative prayer must be a habit, a virtue, a discipline.

It’s not easy to contemplate God because the self gets in the way. We get distracted. And rather than worshiping and entering the divine life, our prayers become a list of demands to Christ: “Hey, do this. Tell someone else to do that.”

Jesus cares about our daily needs and worries, but we have forgotten the beauty of the contemplative prayer, of sitting being a partaker in this divine feast, and letting ourselves be changed by the reality that the divine has come into the world.

Ultimately, it’s the intimate encounter with God’s love that gives us the strength and the courage to keep going back out and pursuing our ideals, founding communities, and bringing others together, as St. Teresa of Avila did.

As we concluded the service, we sang together (in Spanish) these words of St. Teresa of Avila:

“Let nothing trouble you; let nothing frighten you. All things are passing; God never changes. Patience obtains all things. Whoever has God lacks nothing: God alone suffices.”

I concluded the service with these words from St. Teresa of Avila:

“May this self of mine die, and may Another, greater than myself and better for me than myself, live in me, so that I may serve Him.”

DONATE

I’m going to Miami for a family reunion of my crazy Cuban family in a week. I love Miami because no one asks me if I’m named after a drink. Everyone knows how to spell and pronounce my name. Margarita, like my mom, my dearly departed abuelita, or my first girlfriend, they might say. Or they might lengthen my name to Maria Margarita. Or Margarita Ana (which happens to be correct). Or they might shorten my name to Maggy, which I love. If they are from Nicaragua, they will certainly recite the first line of Rubén Darío’s poem that starts: Margarita, está linda la mar.

Strangers don’t bother with my name. They just use one of the many generic but affectionate Spanish words for girl, like mama, mami, mamita, reina, princesa, preciosa, muñeca, linda, flaca, guapa, mi amor, mi corazon or mi vida.

Strangers don’t bother with my name. They just use one of the many generic but affectionate Spanish words for girl, like mama, mami, mamita, reina, princesa, preciosa, muñeca, linda, flaca, guapa, mi amor, mi corazon or mi vida.

When I’m around my huge extended family, I’m just la hija de Lala. Why bother with first names at all when, just like in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s epic family tale 100 Years of Solitude, names repeat across generations and branches of the family? There will be at least 5 Margaritas running around my gigantic family reunion at Miami Beach. Not to mention 8 Cristinas, 10 Teresas, 14 Anas, 25 Marias, 5 Javiers, 6 Patricios, 7 Antonios, 9 Manuels, and 12 Carloses.

I vacillate between amusement and pity for the in-laws meeting the crazy Gaston clan for the first time. It’s just like a scene from My Big Fat Greek wedding: ladies with big hair and nails standing around a roasted pig telling you: This is my cousin Carlos, my other cousin Carlos, and my nephew Carlitos. Let’s go sit with Mimi, Bibi, Gigi and Titi. Have you seen Ani, Anita, Ana Maria or Ana Cecilia? Where are Manuel, Manolo, Manolito and Manny? Have you met Beba and Bebo? Have you met Juanito’s wife Juanita?

Then my mom will walk up and say: Hi, I’m Lala. It’s easy to pronounce. Like a song. Lalalalalala. If you compliment her singing voice, she’ll pull out her guitar and sing you Guantamera, Jalisco, or Cielito Lindo. If you are really lucky, she will belt out Cucurrucucu Paloma!!! Lalalalala will hit the high notes on Ay yay yay yay yay so high your ears might pop and you might get kicked out of the hotel lobby. If you join in the ay yay yay yay yay, you have officially joined the clan.

My mom’s real name is Eulalia Maria Suarez Gaston, but I bet her relatives couldn’t tell you her full name. Practically no one in the extended family has a clue about anyone’s real name. No one goes by their real name and on one cares.

American in-laws look puzzled when people introduce themselves saying: My name is Jose but call me Pepito. Or: I’m Kiko, which is short for Francisco. The in-laws then give up trying to make sense of it all when the next person says: I’m Paco, which is also short for Francisco.

This is not magical realism. This is my real crazy Cuban-American family that I love so much gathering a city that makes me come alive like no other.

Epilogue: For a few years, I used Margarita Mooney Suarez as my professional name, but then, after marrying David Clayton in 2022, I dropped Suarez and added Clayton as my new last name. But I don’t expect anyone in my family to bother using such a long name. I hope they just call me guapa, mi amor, mamita, or just “la hija de Lala.”

SUPPORT SCALA

On Valentine’s Day in 2021, I sat on stage to discuss suicide with an existentialist philosopher, Mary Townsend, and we were joined online by a psychiatrist, Aaron Kheriaty, and a comedian, Jeremy McLlelan.

What on earth was I doing? Is that a joke? No, it’s not. I gobbled down seven heart-shaped chocolates, three double espressos, and walked out on stage.

This event was part of the annual New York Encounter, a weekend long series of talks, performances and exhibits which aim to re-direct all of human desire towards God. I’m heading up to Manhattan in a few days for this event, and hope to see some of you there. Check out the program—it’s free to everyone, and many sessions are livestreamed.

As we are yet to come out of the epidemic of despair, I thought I’d share the somber yet hopeful reflections that I published following the panel discussion on suicide. My thoughts were originally published in The National Catholic Register on February 18, 2021.

In this clip, McLlelan, a convert to Catholicism who has struggled with depression, compares therapy and confession in this clip, emphasizing that the goal of confession is to name our faults and receive God’s grace. Even the best therapy, he said, can’t replace receiving God’s merciful grace as we struggle with our responsibility for our failings, regardless of the mental illness struggles we have.

Growing up, I witnessed close family members struggle with mental illness. As a professor, the worst moment ever was when a student I tried to help took her own life. Despite the dark reality of suicide, I share my insights on how to hold on to hope, to pray for the dead, and love those who are left grieving in our epidemic of meaninglessness. See my 2021 reflection on this panel below.

I wish you all a blessed and hopeful start to Lent, and I hope to see some of you in NYC at the NY Encounter 2026!

Why on Earth? A Psychiatrist, Philosopher, Comedian and Theologian Discuss Darkness, Suicide and Hope

By Margarita Mooney Clayton. Originally Published in The National Catholic Register, February 21, 2026.

All of human experience — including its most tragic elements — needs to be brought into the light so we can better understand that we are created in love, fallen in sin, and redeemed by an all-loving God.

Why on earth would anyone agree to spend Valentine’s Day chatting with a psychiatrist, and existentialist philosopher, and a comedian about suicide?

Suicide rates in the United States have been going up at least since 1999. I was heartbroken when a student I mentored at Yale took her own life. The social isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has only made a bad situation worse. I was speechless when one of my best friends lost her husband to suicide in 2020.

Subscribe now

When the organizers of the New York Encounter, an annual meeting sponsored by Communion and Liberation, the ecclesial movement started by the Italian priest, Father Luigi Giussani, asked me to moderate a panel on suicide, I agreed. The three panelists with whom I met on Feb. 14 were Aaron Kheriaty, professor of psychiatry at the University of California at Irvine School of Medicine, Mary Townsend, assistant professor of philosophy at St. John’s University in Queens, New York, and Jeremy McClellan, an international stand-up comedian and recent convert to Catholicism.

I’ve written several scholarly papers focusing on moral agency of the mentally ill, the importance of narratives to heal from trauma, the reasons people give for turning to illegal drugs or alcohol to cope with mental illness, and how prayer and meditation can relieve some symptoms of mental illness. Like my own work that aims to integrate philosophy and theology with social sciences, each of the panelists brought his personal faith and theological insights to the discussion.

Before taking the stage at New York University’s Sheen Center, I knelt down before the tabernacle in the chapel and asked God to guide me. Still nervous, I gulped down too many pieces of Valentine’s Day chocolate and drank nearly double my normal daily caffeine load.

Share

Then I grabbed the microphone and stepped out on stage wearing black pants, a white shirt and pointy red high heels. Staring into the stage lights, trusting there was a camera streaming my words, I welcomed the thousands of virtual participants to a painful yet crucial discussion on suicide.

Some of the questions we addressed included: How do we understand the interplay of various factors that cause mental illness? When and how can medicine and therapy help mental illness, and how can prayer and confession help us grow in the virtues that strengthen our will?

Can discussing the reality of rising rates of suicide with our friends, students and loved ones open up a basic existential question: Why did we come into being in the first place? If my life is imperfect, is there a perfect being out there? How can people of faith communicate hope to people plunged in darkness?

In many of our universities, even Christian ones, when a student commits suicide, there is virtually no forum to take seriously the very question: Why is it good that I exist as opposed to not existing? Pondering this question can be the beginning of a deep philosophical inquiry that can lead to hope in a perfect being who fulfills our deepest desires.

From a Catholic perspective, mental illness can never be purely understood as simply biological, nor as simply a spiritual struggle. We are a unity of mind, body and soul. As more people seek out psychiatric medications or therapy to help with mental illness, it’s important to remember that Christian hope doesn’t come in the form of a pill. Nor can a therapist heal our wounds from sin. Together, medicine, therapy and the sacraments can help us grow in the human and theological virtues we need to experience lasting happiness.

[Kheriaty discusses his work as a psychiatrist that avoids a reduction of the human person to simply a body.]

Suicide is not new to the human condition. But given its rise in the last two decades in the United States, it is almost inevitable that each of us will know someone who takes their life. One thing we all shared is that when say when someone you love loses someone to suicide, the most important thing is to be present. Death is not a problem to be analyzed and fixed.

The longer I live, the more I realize that loving and suffering, living and dying, are two sides of the same coin of being human. All of human experience — including its most tragic elements — needs to be brought into the light so we can better understand that we are created in love, fallen in sin, and redeemed by an all-loving God.

Talking about suicide makes me nervous, perhaps because there is no perfect answer to tragedy. But I can’t use scholarly description, the eschaton or salvation as an excuse not to look at the darkness that penetrating so many hearts. For some people, our human brokenness is a sign that reality is ultimately chaotic. As a Catholic, I can share with anyone of any faith background, or no faith at all, my hope that despite human fallenness, the basis of all reality is God’s merciful love.

[Here Mary Townsend talks about teaching during suicide clusters at two different universities.]

The season of Lent, with its penitential practices of almsgiving, prayer and fasting, is a time of entering into the darkness so that the light of Christ can shine on those we encounter. We never know what darkness someone may be fighting, but we do know that we are called to share the hope we have that comes from certainty in the resurrection on Easter Sunday.

SUPPORT CULTURAL RENEWAL

Following my lecture on January 29, 2026, to about 30 PhD and Master’s students at Columbia Teachers’ College in Manhattan, one audience member, who is also a young Catholic priest doing a PhD at Columbia in Education and Psychology said to me with his eyes wide open:

“You just jumped into the lion’s den!! You critiqued John Dewey at Columbia!!!??”

Dewey taught education and philosophy at Columbia for 25 years, and to this day, its school of education thinks of Dewey as its most influential figure—past and present. Perhaps no one more than Dewey has had an impact on American education, especially public K-12 education.

As I entered ‘the lion’s den’, I posed for this picture at Dewey’s bust. Why am I frowning? I admit—I was fearful I’d be ridiculed or mocked for my talk, which explicitly contrasted Dewey with Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain.

But I was also frowning because I care about happiness. The reason I began reading educational philosophy about 15 years ago is because too many students are NOT happy.

In the questions after my talk, I kept coming back to the heart of the Maritain’s concerns about Dewey. John Dewey’s philosophy purportedly contains all we need to understand all of reality, and he proscribes a path of life-long inquiry into truth that he thinks will leads to personal happiness. But I agree with Maritain that any philosophy of the human person that overlooks that we are fallen and in need of God’s grace does not produce joy.

The progressive fallacy—that we need not worry about our sins—which arises from Dewey’s pragmatism replaces dependence on God with dependence on ourselves. Dewey places faith in human cooperation; but without God’s grace can we truly love our neighbors as they are, which is far from perfect?

An hour before my talk, I had warmed up my soul by going to Corpus Christi Catholic Church just one block away. I sat in silence in this stunningly beautiful church where many Columbia converts have worshipped, including monk and author Thomas Merton. I contemplated Christ on the cross, Christ in the Eucharist, Christ in Mary’s womb. I prayed the rosary. I asked the Holy Spirit for the words to say and the demeanor to say them with love.

Why was I at Columbia? I had been cordially invited by the professor who leads Columbia’s program in educational and philosophy. He’s keenly interested in the vocation to teach, and what it means to be present with students. When we spoke to plan my visit, knowing I’m Catholic, he encouraged me to be explicitly theological in my engagement with Dewey.

If I live by grace, can I be honest by that from the podium at Columbia? Or should I hide it? I accepted the invitation to be authentic.

My talk focused on one of my favorite conversation partners, Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, whom few students in the room would have heard of. I spent the first half an hour of my talk going through Maritain’s biography. Maritain wasn’t always Catholic—he tried on just about any and every form of secular philosophy looking for a total explanation of reality. When his search turned up empty, he contemplated suicide. He was drawn to the Catholic faith at first through the arts—poetry, art and music. It was a combination of deep prayer and deep reading of Thomas Aquinas that solidified his conversion to the Catholic faith.

Like Dewey, Maritain was a man of the world, a public philosopher, and committing to dialogue with those who were different from him. Speaking at Yale in the mid-1940s, Maritain critiqued Dewey because, as good as his educational methods were, they were limited because he neglected the spiritual side of the student, at least as Maritain understands the term spirituality.

Subscribe now

One major critique of Dewey which I pointed out is that in Dewey’s book A Common Faith, he aims to separate religious values from “encumbrances” like religious creeds or rituals. The creation story in Genesis says humans are made in the image of God but fallen in sin. Should we now just dis-regard religious revelation, creeds and rituals because we have scientific truth reached by the scientific method, as Dewey says? Why would any religious values survive at all in what Maritain saw in Dewey: a stony, positivist (ie., materialistic, de-sacralized) vision of the person?

Are we creatures in need of God’s grace for our personal growth, as Maritain says, and as most people throughout history would have agreed?

The majority of students in the room seemed to sincerely believe that spiritually without any creed is more conducive to human flourishing than one with a creed or revelation from God of any kind—not just for themselves but for students in our schools.

I see Dewey’s self as an endless “doing”, never resting, never contemplating anything so real, so intimate to us, but yet also mysterious. If there is any God in Dewey’s system, it’s not one we can relate to personally, much less one who seeks us out in loving mercy.

If we remove from society and education the idea that God is a real being, not just a psychological fiction the self uses to rely more on itself, do we not take away the joy that comes from being loved as we are—sinners in need of mercy?

When I asked, "Honestly, how well is that really working for our students?” the room burst into laughter.

I think Maritain was right when he said that humans are created for great things. But the principle of growth in the good is not the self itself, but rather the self encountering God’s grace. That loving encounter allows the student to overcome vices of laziness and selfishness and grow virtue, which is the only sure path to happiness.

It is not more reasonable to think that something outside us, bigger than us but capable of loving us, can make us feel whole and lead us towards our purpose?

I enjoyed the presentation and conversation immensely. as I believe everyone in the room was sincerely seeking truth through open conversation. Dewey, like many others I may disagree with, would have welcomed such open, constructive dialogue across differences. So would have Jacques Maritain. Numerous people of religious creeds, including Catholics, are graduates of Columbia Teacher’s College. The openness to the Catholic faith by those outside the church was in fact very heartening to me, a sign that Catholic voices can be heard and taken seriously in the academy.

I noted that the poster advertising my talk said Princeton University, not Princeton Theological Seminary. And the title I gave for the talk emphasized story and the importance of the humanities. The term ‘graced imagination’ could be used to describe a non-personal, non-Trinitarian God. But that’s not what I mean by that term. Like Maritain, I worry that without God’s grace the deepest recess of our souls can be dark, not light. We need God’s beauty to shine light into the world and in our hearts.

After the talk, one student wrote to me, asking for more resources on my comment that beauty is God’s splendor radiating into the world. “I am so grateful that you spoke at Columbia, as it has openego the door to all of these avenues of thought development, which I find really exciting,” she said.

I have no doubt that most students in the Ivy League are seeking the truth, as only the truth can make us free and happy. But many students in the Ivy League read progressive philosophers and few encounter theological philosophy.

Perhaps the tide is turning. For all those who attended my talk last week, thank you for your honest seeking to understand my theological perspective. I chatted with numerous students at the reception, and have heard from many of them over email, seeking to understand more of what I said.

There’s enough to write about Dewey and Maritain on education, the human person and beauty to fill one more books.if you want my book recommendations, you can start with my books The Love of Learning and The Wounds of Beauty, which themselves contain extensive references for further reading. See also below for some of my videos where I discuss Maritain and Dewey.

For those of you who want to be happy, I encourage you to learn more about you can connect to the Scala Foundation’s Way of Beauty fellowship, mentorship and curriculum which we describe on Scala’s website.

DONATE TO SCALA

See This video where I discuss Maritain’s ideas about virtue in education.

And this video where I discuss Dewey’s pragmatism that leads to a materialist view of the person.

For the past four years, Sarah Scudder, the wife of Bethel’s senior pastor Derick Scudder, has partnered with Nyansa Classical Community to provide after-school instruction to children from their neighborhood. In January 2025, I made my first visit to Bethel and Nyansa with a group of students from Princeton Theological Seminary. Rayne was immediately enthralled by the infectious joy of one of my students named Blessing.

“Is that a baby in your belly?” Rayne asked Blessing, who was about a month shy of giving birth to her second child.

Subscribe now

We worked through readings from the classic curriculum like the Odyssey, as well as art and music with a lively group of mostly public-school children. Blessing first taught passionately and then sat patiently with each student for a few minutes, encouraging them.

Although Blessing hadn’t been able to come back this year, I knew she’d love it if Rayne wrote her a note. Rayne grabbed her notebook and pens and drew a picture for Blessing. Then she wrote in big letters, “I MISS YOU BLESSING!”

When I shared this story with Blessing over email, I could picture her smiling from ear to ear.

“I’m so glad Rayne remembers me. It’s amazing what a short encounter can mean in one’s life,” Blessing wrote.

As Dr. Adams Parham described in her book co-authored with Dr. Anika Prather, The Black Intellectual Tradition: Reading Freedom in Classical Literature, the classical tradition shaped African American intellectuals and educators, who in turn made their own contributions to those great traditions.

Even though Nyansa’s classical education program in Philadelphia, as in other locations, primarily reaches students of minority ethnicities, they are not apologetic about the Western classical tradition. Rather, their curriculum masterfully exposes students in their after-school programs to classical literature, art and music from the broader Western tradition but also from African American intellectuals like Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass who found great inspiration in the classics as they sought to build free communities of African Americans through education.

One student in my class shared how Nyansa overturns the stereotype of classical education as elitist and classical schools as expensive. Through Nyansa, Angel has devised a low-cost way to bring the classical tradition into communities that may lack financial resources but have hearts longing for beauty, truth and goodness. Sarah, who coordinates the Nyansa after-school program for Bethel Chapel Church, has studied classical education.

But the program mostly relies on volunteer teachers. We studied their teacher’s guide, read the week’s lesson plans, and showed up ready to teach a group of children. No one in our group had ever formally studied Latin so we approached that lesson with trepidation.

An older student in my class who is a Coptic Orthodox bishop and monk with extensive experience in education and church ministry led the Latin lesson. “I was shocked that the kids were enjoying their Latin lesson!” he remarked afterwards.

One of my students remarked how she learned that we should not assume to know what kids might be interested in. Because of the personal connection between students and volunteer teachers, the kids we met we far from disengaged when we read the Odyssey and connected the story to the virtue of kindness and vice of harshness.

Making the classics accessible to them by using drawings, art, and the love of storytelling about good and bad characters, we saw how that children who may attend under-performing public schools are not incapable of engaging with classical texts.

After studying math in Nigeria, Blessing taught young girls. She quickly learned that they need a teacher who could care for their soul as well as their mind. Like too many teachers, she faced burnout.

The connection Rayne felt with Blessing illustrated the principle that a teacher who knows how to make a student loved can make challenge material exciting to learn. Teaching can never be just a role or a job.

“Nyansa has got something great going on,” Blessing wrote. “Your course that exposed me to Nyansa was life transforming for me. It helped me reflect on my goal in life and the reason why I came to graduate school in the first place.”

As Sarah told my class, she hopes that when students like Rayne look back at their time with Nyansa, they remember “something that enticed them, that was beautiful, or that whetted their appetite to go back to something that they’ve learned. We aim to give them a life-long desire to learn.”

Some students who come to Nyansa are facing great challenges in reading, sometimes being several years behind. Such deficits would take more than an after-school program to overcome. At Nyansa, their programs start with Scripture and with love. Nyansa provides time for homework support in math and basic reading lessons. Then they cover supplemental subjects like art, music and great books.

Each week, the Bible stories, literature, and Latin all focus on similar themes like love and hate, honesty and dishonesty, fortitude and courage. The content students learn aims to enlightens them about universal truths and spark conversations about virtues. The classical approach includes learning vocabulary and math skills, but also logic and reasoning, which helps the students better understand the Bible the Christian faith.

When we helped teach in January 2026, one of my students, an experienced classical educator, brought his guitar and showed them a song he had written about the Odyssey that mimicked the structure of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. Despite some initial resistance, every student at the table wrote their own lyrics and sang their songs. One young girl aged nine even wrote her own guitar chords!

Nyansa Classical Community offers classical educational resources to communities, churches and families regardless of their economic status. As of early 2026, around fifteen groups were using Nyansa’s curriculum, and they hope that expands each year.

As Sarah explained, “The money is not what is driving this. We do our little piece, and we try to bring Christ to that. Therefore, we don’t have to do everything, because the ultimate gift is God’s grace. We trust in that.”

I hugged Rayne goodbye after our January 2026 visit. Then I pondered how even a few hours with something beautiful and sharing in that beauty with others journeying towards God who is all good, can be life transforming for both students and teachers.

Thanks to my class readings and our experience like Nyansa, I’ve seen students like Blessing embrace their vocation to teach and students like Rayne break stereotypes, fall in love with learning, and create beauty to share with others. The communities which have grown around Nyansa’s unique approach to classical education show how moments of grace, of true communion with others become lasting memories which become wellsprings of purpose and motivation to share our loves and our knowledge with others.

I encourage you to read more about Nyansa, support their programs, and, if you are a classical educator or church leader, you can buy their curricula and even consider partnering with them!

Donate to Scala

Tomorrow, Saturday December 13th, 2025, on BBC Radio 3 at 8 am ET (1 pm UK) you can hear me on the third of a unique six-part series on faith and music. I was invited to be a part of this program by Sir James MacMillan, who in turn, was invited by the BBC to share his insights on Biblical themes that resonate in the works of his favorite composers past and present. The others who engage in conversation on this series include Dr. Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Sarah Moerman of the University of St. Andrew’s, and a young Scottish composer named Jay Capperauld.

The genesis of this incredible opportunity to reflect about God’s creation and human co-creation with God through music was produced by Freya Hellier for BBC Radio 3, a channel dedicated to great music. The six days of creation in the Book of Genesis set the theme for the six sessions which are named: Darkness and Light, Sky and Air, The Green Planet, The Cosmos, The Sea and the Living Planet.

How does one prepare for a conversation with one of the most celebrated living composers and a man of deep faith? Riding up on the train from Oxford to Glasgow, I poured over my academic writings and my spiritual journals, creating pages of notes on faith and creativity, the mysterious nature of inspiration, and the call to create something beautiful for others to enjoy.

I had never been inside such a large recording studio, so I was graciously given a tour. Inside one studio, I decided to pretend I was recording the news. As with singing, before I speak publicly, I warm up my voice so I can get the right tone and speed. Next thing I knew, I was creating this ‘fake news’ clip that some people saw on Instagram and thought was real!

The conversations are beautifully presented as introducing great works of music, ranging from Haydn, Beethoven, and Hildegard Von Bingen. It makes me smile to hear James’s introduce my remarks—the way he pronounces my name in his Scottish accent is music to my ears!

While listening to the digital radio live this past Saturday, I walked over to the Princeton University Chapel, where I sing every Sunday in a choir for the Aquinas Institute. I marveled at how this neo-Gothic church, modeled on a 14th century English Cathedral, imitates God’s creation: beautiful windows celebrate our salvation through Biblical stories; wood carvings remind us that God invites us to participate in his ongoing governance over all creation.

Singing James’s “O Radiant Dawn” the following day during Sunday Mass, again at the Princeton University Chapel, I pondered how the vaulted ceilings are reminiscent of the sky. Human creation, as beautiful as it is, lifts us up to the infinite, the abyss, on the other side of which we intuit an eternal present touching us now.

Anyone can listen to the digital radio live, but, unfortunately, recordings of past sessions are only available to BBC subscribers. So, tune in live this Saturday, December 13th, at 8 am ET, and again at the same time December 20th, December 28th and January 3rd.

I’m eager to hear the remaining four episodes, and hope you enjoy the music and the inspiration during this time of Advent and Christmas.

Sincerely,

Margarita Mooney Clayton, PhD

Founder, the Scala Foundation