Abstract
The author argues that humans have a right to beauty, and that the poor, often immersed in ugliness, have a particular and urgent need for and claim upon this right. Beauty provides a contemplative and self-transcending rest essential to human flourishing, while the encounter with beauty enables human persons to realize their vocation as cocreators. Deprived of their fair share of creation's bounty and mired in filth and squalor, the poor have a right to savor and create beauty.
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