There are some things which are not often associated with the word "beautiful." Our lesson today ends with an image associating such an item with "beautiful," and then bringing up another topic which seems completely unrelated. This odd sentence is: "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news."

It is strange enough to call feet beautiful. Most often we think of feet in a much more utilitarian context, as something we stand on and walk on, our basic support for standing upright. People who spend substantial amounts of time focusing on the beauty of feet are generally known as "fetishists."

More often we are about as familiar with our feet as the peasant in a story told by the nineteenth-century theologian Soren Kierkegaard. The man normally went barefooted, but once, when he …