In this episode of PeppTalk, host Coby Dolloff sits down with Josh Nadeau, author, artist, and one of Substack's most compelling voices on faith and culture, for a conversation on beauty, embodiment, and what it takes to become whole. Josh is the creator of Sword and Pencil, a platform where he shares his iconography-influenced art and writing, and the author of multiple books, including Room for Good Things to Run Wild: How Ordinary People Become Everyday Saints.In this conversation, you'll hear why beauty is the most powerful apologetic for a data-obsessed world, how the Great Books told Josh the truth about where he was, and what it actually means to live in your body as a spiritual practice.If you're in the dark wood right now, or beginning to wonder if there's more to the spiritual life than memorizing the right platitudes, this episode is for you. Transcript: Coby Dolloff: Hey everybody, welcome back to PeppTalk. It’s good to have you with us. We’re here where we bring the conversations that happen on campus to you, our listeners. I’m Coby, your host — sad Alexa is not with us today — but I’ve got a very special guest to introduce you to, a good friend of mine, Josh Nadeau. Josh, it’s good to have you. I’ll give you a formal bio here in a second. Josh Nadeau: Yeah, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Also, you didn’t tell me the name of the podcast. Coby: PeppTalk. Josh: PeppTalk! Coby: Yeah. Do you like that? Josh: I do like it. Decent. Coby: Yeah — I mean, we thought about the name for a while, and it was back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and one day we were like, “PeppTalk.” Nice little pun. We were like, that’s it. Josh: I love a little pun. Very sweet. Coby: So — I always tell Alexa, we always fight about this. You can answer this for us; this is our most important first question. Obviously, formally on Spotify or whatever, it’s the PeppTalk Podcast. But if you’re talking about it, then is it “PeppTalk” or is it “the PeppTalk”? Josh: Oh, you guys just do “PeppTalk.” It’s just “PeppTalk.” Coby: Thank you. Alexa, if you’re out there! Josh: ‘Cause, like, you can’t be like, “Hey, we’re gonna go have the PeppTalk.” That sounds like it’s about to get serious. That’s like English as a second language — “Can I please have the breakfast?” You can cut that if you’re not allowed to put that in. That’s like how I speak Spanish. “Hey, where are the friends of mine?” Coby: Just breakfast — we’re just about to have breakfast. We’re just gonna have the PeppTalk. Josh: Yeah, we’re just gonna have the breakfast meal — the PeppTalk Podcast. Coby: Anyway — so here’s Josh. Josh, if you don’t know him, has a large Instagram following through an account called Sword and Pencil — puts out a lot of great art, iconography. I’ll let you talk a little bit more about your work here in a second. But he’s an artist; he’s also a writer — multiple books, including a book that was really impactful for me. It’s called Room for Good Things to Run Wild: How Ordinary People Become Everyday Saints, which I’ll talk about some more in a bit. But Josh is on campus here at Pepperdine for an event we’re putting on in collaboration with our friends at the Society for Classical Learning. Our Great Books people, the K-through-12 classical learning people, are all here thinking about: how can we educate students in a way that they learn to love the true, the good, and the beautiful, and how can we have what happens in the classroom actually inform character rather than just minds? And so — a lot of people who believe in a lot of good things. It’s been a fun week. So Josh, I’ll quit yapping here. I want to just first start with your work. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do design-wise? We’ll link some of your art in the episode, but what kind of art are you doing? What’s it influenced by? How did you kind of come to do that? And then I’d love to talk about the book after that. Josh: I mean, well, first off, it’s cool what you guys are doing with the summit, because that’s the big thing for me — how do you translate transcendental things into a way that someone can live? Right? Like, all things just developed in the sense of: you cultivate it, you figure out what you like doing and what resonates with you and other people. So my art, as it stands now, is some mishmash, stylistically, of iconography and traditional tattoo and comic books — very folky. Coby: Cool. Josh: And for the reason of — I view beauty as an apologetic. You know this. Just like people are wrestling through the big ideas — what is truth, what is going on — I think beauty gets to do the same thing. We get to use beauty as an apologetic, and as Christians, I believe we have the most beautiful story to tell. Coby: Can you talk for a second — if people aren’t familiar, when you say beauty is an apologetic, what is it? How’s beauty gonna save the world, buddy? What does this mean? Josh: Totally, yeah. So, the idea of beauty saving the world — generally, my take on how the world has gone, and you don’t need to agree with me, this is just how I view life: as we moved into the modernist and postmodern world, everything just became idea-driven. So you have the modernist views of, like, scientists — the only things that exist and the only things that matter are things you can touch and see and measure. And then that’s where you have the rise of all these psychos who are like, “Oh yeah, there could be no God, because we can’t put him in a beaker.” Be like, “Oh, true — so smart, man.” So I did my undergrad in physics, and this is one of the big things you bump into all the time: how do we move from what is physical and seen to what is metaphysical and unseen? Coby: Yeah — because measuring something does not take away the mystery. Josh: Totally. It doesn’t explain why. So Richard Feynman has this — he’s a physicist; he’s, like, the GOAT physicist. And he has this thing where he became friends with an artist, and the artist was teaching him how to paint, and he would teach this artist physics and math and stuff. Coby: Cool. Josh: And they had this amazing conversation, where the artist one day was like, “Listen — you see the world in one way; I see the world in a different way. I appreciate art and beauty in a way that you don’t.” And Richard Feynman said an amazing — he was like, “That’s not true. You look at the flower and you see color and composition and all of these things. I look at the flower and I see the design of it. I know how the carbon and the oxygen molecules are separating,” and whatever. So those things are very true — you can still look at life poetically. But in that world of these people who think data will save you — and that gets into the church all the time here — “Think! Memorize these eight definitions, and now you’re not addicted to any of your vices. No, you’re good.” All of those people still go and consume movies and books and music, and they wanna go to the beach and watch the sunset. Beauty is doing something for them that is immeasurable. Coby: Even if they’re not clocking it. Josh: Exactly. Even if they don’t know what’s going on, something is doing work on them. And in the tradition — the Christian tradition — we believe in goodness, truth, and beauty, the transcendentals. God is the source of those things. There’s the ontological reality of those, in that hierarchy. And so that is essentially just a stupid, nerdy way of saying that being leads to truth, leads to virtue, leads to beauty. But there’s a psychological way of experiencing them, which is: we always experience the beauty of a thing first. Right? Like, when I saw my now-wife, I wasn’t like, “Wow, she’s such a true person.” I was like, “Whoa — super pretty. I’m in.” And so I think that’s the apologetic for our modern time, at least for a certain scope of people. So my art is doing it — it’s rooted in truth and it’s rooted in virtue, but I wanna present that as beautifully as possible. And I want it to be this open invitation that does work on someone before their brains and rationality can dismiss it as, say, Christian. Coby: Yeah, because you can’t argue with it. Right — I remember I visited the Vatican as a senior in high school. And at that point I was still just kind of a jock, figuring things out. I wasn’t talking about the transcendentals. I wasn’t reading. And I went over and looked at Michelangelo’s Pietà and I just started weeping, and I didn’t know what was happening to me. I didn’t have the terms; I didn’t know why I was being affected in this way. I was being pierced by beauty, right? I was being pierced by something that went — like, the intellect was still knocking at the front door, and beauty had gone in through the window. Josh: Yeah — and it’s an amazing thing. Those things drown you. Beauty drowns you. And then the best thing about beauty is it drowns you to life. You feel like you can breathe for the first time. So you have this moment where you’re like, “Maybe I was drowning for the rest of my life — and now I saw the Pietà, and I’m like, oh, I can breathe again.” And so — I am not at that level, obviously. Coby: Hey, we’re getting there. Josh: Yeah. But I think one of the important things with my art — what I love to do is be invitational, be open. I love the richness of symbolism. So, I’m Eastern Orthodox, and in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, iconography is a deeply layered, rich, symbolic way of viewing reality properly. So, for example, Jesus will always be wearing the same two colors — you have the blue and you have the red, and one represents his divinity and will be cloaked over by his humanity. So that’s doing a theological telling, symbolically
