David Henrie Says Beauty Can Point People To God In New Series Set In Italy
David Henrie moved from child-star fame into a faith-driven creative life, and his newest work wears that intention on its sleeve. He has traded some of Hollywood’s spotlight for projects aimed at pointing viewers back to God. The pivot feels personal and purposeful.
His six-part series, Seeking Beauty With David Henrie, follows him through Italy as he examines culture, architecture, food, art, and music to ask how beauty can lead people to God. The show streams on EWTN+ and bills itself as an unusual blend of travel and spiritual reflection. Henrie treats the camera like a companion as he learns alongside viewers.
Henrie says Europeans of earlier centuries deliberately used art to teach faith, and he believes modern viewers can still be drawn. “They really saw beauty as a reflection of the Divine, and to strip that out of society, they realized, would be to strip God out of society.” That conviction is the spine of the series.
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On screen Henrie wanders basilicas and piazzas, lingering over mosaics, frescoes, and the way light falls through stained glass. He insists these are not mere decorations but visual sermons that once explained Scripture for people who could not read. The idea is simple: beauty can be a doorway to truth.
He describes the visceral effect churches were built to produce. “The first thing that they do when they go into these churches is they look up, they walk in, and their eyes are instantly drawn upward to the heavens. And that was very intentional,” he says, noting how architecture lifts the heart and mind to God.
Henrie highlights how churches tried to give worshippers a taste of heaven. “The old churches were trying to build a little heaven on earth – were trying to give you a divine experience, were trying to witness to you without having to speak.” That nonverbal witness, he argues, still speaks today.
Centuries ago, when most people could not read, the visual language of faith mattered immensely. “Especially for us Bible-believing Christians, that’s a hard concept to grasp,” he observes. “… They created churches that were a living Bible. They gave you images and experiences of things that were stories that Jesus handed down.”
Henrie recalls climbing to a cathedral rooftop and seeing statues that, from below, seem small but were carved with obsessive detail. He watched close-up craftsmanship designed, he says, not for human applause but for God. “The people at the time knew that some things were just for God, and that was a common experience,” he reflects.
That long view is another through line: builders knew they might never live to see completion, yet they worked as if for eternity. “They built it, knowing that they would be dead by the time it was done,” he says. “… They knew the importance of what these buildings represented to the people.”
Henrie’s production company, Novo Inspire Studios, aims to keep making content that lifts rather than flatters. Seeking Beauty is only the start; a second season is planned in Spain to continue tracing how art and faith intertwine. The mission is unapologetically to make work that points people upward.
His own story threads through the series: Hollywood success did not satisfy the longing he felt for something deeper. “I was steeped in relativism, steeped in agnosticism, just like a Hollywood kid working, you know – I had a great career and just wasn’t paying any attention to it,” Henrie said. “But I had a restlessness that began to grow in my heart. I knew that I needed something that wasn’t material. I knew I needed something spiritual, something that could be everlasting. And it led to a massive conversion point in my life, a massive change. I’m 36 now. I have three kids, married eight years, but I was about 21 or 22 – it was actually 2012 – when I made the change.”
“And it has since radically changed my life.” That testimony undergirds the series: beauty becomes a tool God uses to wake souls to His presence. For viewers hungry for a reminder that the world points beyond itself, Henrie’s pilgrimage offers an invitation to look up and see.
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