We’re living in faster and faster days, full of more and more content. We speed from one digital bit of stimulation to another—from podcasts to articles to YouTube videos and more. Helpful as some of this content is, the accumulated glut and pace of it doesn’t make us wise. To be wise we desperately need to slow down, reflect, synthesize, and give our attention to fewer things more fully. The arts can help us do this.

Beauty—which is closely tied to Sabbath—helps us slow down and focus. It gives our souls breathing room. It helps us notice God’s creation more, which can then help us worship God more. This is one of the points I make in the chapter on beauty in my new book  The Wisdom Pyramid, and it’s also a theme Terry Glaspey picks up in his own new release book, Discovering God Through the Arts.

“Art can help us learn to be immersively present in the moment. Not just kind of there, but totally there,” Glaspey writes in an excerpt from the book featured below. “Looking at art, listening to music or a poem, reading a descriptive passage in a novel, or viewing a film can force me to slow down, quiet my restless thoughts, and open myself to a new glimpse of God’s goodness.”

We all need more glimpses of God’s goodness in this painful, difficult life. Sadly technology is dulling our senses. The ability to “taste and see” God’s goodness is more elusive. But great art can retrain our senses. That’s why—however inefficient and superfluous it seems—beauty is so essential.