For Dr. Margarita Mooney Clayon, the crisis of modernity is the death of the sacred. Rationalism, materialism, and consumerism are replacing the transcendent. Self-expression is producing abstraction. Modernity has left humans wandering about the wasteland. The consequence is that many college students are directionless, and they are not the better for it. Dr. Mooney is changing that.

Dr. Mooney and her husband, artist David Clayton, lead the Way of Beauty fellowship group at their home in Princeton, New Jersey. Dr. Mooney is the associate professor of congregational studies at Princeton Theological Seminary (PTS) and the author of four books on art and education. Dr. Clayton is an iconographer and the author of The Way of Beauty: Liturgy, Education, and Inspiration for Family, School, and College, the group’s namesake.

The first meeting of the Way of Beauty was in September of 2025. Dr. Mooney noticed that years after the pandemic, students were still socially isolated. And their isolation meant spiritual emptiness. After a few student groups invited her and Dr. Clayton to speak on the topic of Beauty, the Way of Beauty began. Students started making friends, and the rest is history.

Modeled after the design of John Wesley’s Class Meetings, the Way of Beauty offers students mentorship, prayer, worship, discipleship, and spiritual accountability. It is open to all PTS seminarians, members of Christian denominations, and even non-Christians, although belief in the possibility of a God is a requirement. Dr. Mooney and Dr. Clayton are Catholics, John Wesley was the founder of Methodism, and PTS is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (USA). Dr. Mooney likes to remind students that they share more in common than they think. The Way of Beauty is open to the public too. Dr. Mooney said two of the regular attendees are local retirees who learned about the Way of Beauty after attending one of her lectures.

Weekly meetings begin at 7:15 a.m. with students reciting the Way of Beauty preamble:

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.

Students sing psalms, pray, complete acts of service, and then pursue a creative hobby, creating a beautiful piece of music, art, or writing each week. Dr. Mooney says pursuing Beauty is a way of sharing one’s own co-creative abilities in God’s creation. By singing psalms, students quickly learn that the psalms offer a rich vocabulary for expressing human emotions. Students also realize that the purpose of regular and weekly worship is to experience the mystery of God’s divine nature.

In the Way of Beauty, students are given a personal mentor as they discern their vocation and true calling, the calling that leads them to live a life of service to God and neighbor. Dr. Clayton mentors many of the students. He did not have much guidance as an aspiring artist, and he wanted to make sure students did not feel as lost as he had. He has told young artists that they should be free to create art, but they must learn the traditions and skills of the great artists who came before them.

Dr. Clayton’s mentorship has paid dividends. One student talked about seeing God’s presence in the logic and symmetry of mathematics and architecture. Another learned that he wanted to be a pastor and scholar rather than solely an academic. Groups of students are learning and creating music and art, realizing that the pursuit of Beauty for its own sake is key to their happiness.

Beauty must be understood as reflecting the presence of God. The work produced in the pursuit of Beauty echoes something beyond us. In art, for example, abstraction cannot produce Beauty because it is directionless. Or it copies modern-day trends rather than the greatness of method or purpose. Tradition and authority then are the pillars of the great artist, the artist whose impulses are rightly ordered and pride is surrendered.

I have written about Beauty and Dr. Mooney’s classes elsewhere. As I have said before, I count Dr. Mooney as a close friend and personal mentor. The Way of Beauty has since become a program of the Scala Foundation, Dr. Mooney’s own foundation that is restoring the pursuit of Beauty to liberal arts education and American higher education at large. Their work is more than just a grassroots movement. It is a sincere effort to reconnect students with the majesty of God in private life and work.

I look forward to the influence the Way of Beauty and Scala Foundation will have on generations of students.