Join us as we close this year's Origin Series with a conversation with featured writers from the reader.

For the closing of this year's ORIGIN series, Art House Dallas invites you to a joyful evening with art and friends, with a few delightful surprises throughout the night. We'll end the evening with a moderated conversation featuring Dustin Messer, Maggie Philpot, and Michelle Matthews.

Date: Thursday, August 20, 2026

Time: Doors at 6:30 PM, event begins at 7:30 PM

Location: Central Commons Library | 4711 Westside Drive, Dallas, TX 75209
If cost is a barrier to attending.

About Origin

The Christian tradition has long insisted that joy is not a mood or a feeling — it is an enduring gift, made possible by the greatest of virtues: love.

We will explore the Christian tradition's understanding of joy and delight through voices from the early Church, the medieval monastic tradition, and modern Christian writers. Drawing especially on the thought of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the series traces joy as the fruit of love rightly ordered — a transformation that moves the soul from the restless love of self toward the freedom of loving God for God's own sake. In that purification of desire, love becomes joy. And in the modern imagination, thinkers like G.K. Chesterton remind us that delight begins in wonder: the astonished recognition that existence itself is grace.