Science, Art and the Sacred: an Interview with Brandon Vaidyanathan

Here is a recent interview I did with Brandon Vaidyanathan for his Beauty at Work podcast.

I met Brandon at the Scala Foundation conference in Princeton last year and caught up with him again at this year’s conference.

Brandon’s channel is about how beauty works in our world and shapes the work we do. Brandon is a sociology professor at The Catholic University of America in Washington DC. His podcast explores the meaning of beauty in relation to science, justice, morality, food, religion, work, and other aspects of our lives. Through the interviews he conducts he examines how beauty works — how it shapes our personal and social lives in ways that may both contribute to and impede our flourishing.

I talk about my work as a painter and how my training at university in science has contributed to that.

I refer to the work of Bernini, the 17th century Italian sculptor in the interview.

Bernini deliberately cut deeply into the stone to generate sharp shadows and create a rythmical array of lines that mimic the mathematical parabolas and elipses that the physicist uses to describe the natural order.