It took Timothy Willard fourteen years to finish his undergraduate degree. He was busy touring the country in an indie acoustic band you've never heard of, reading George MacDonald in the back of a van. When people asked about his plans, he told them he was attending the University of the Holy Spirit, which meant he was reading Lewis, Chesterton, Eliot, and Augustine, and submitting his assignments as poems.

He eventually finished real college. He then earned a master's in Christian Thought, followed by a PhD in Theology, studying C.S. Lewis and theological aesthetics under Alister McGrath. He moved his family — three daughters all under five — to Oxford to do so. He is completing a monograph on Lewis's "idea of the North" for Manchester University Press. He is also self-publishing his first novel, The Tempest and The Bloom (2026, Riven Press), which editors loved but said was "too fantastical" for Christian audiences.

He is the author of four books, including The Beauty Chasers: Recapturing the Wonder of the Divine (Zondervan Reflective, 2022) and co-author of the acclaimed Veneer: Living Deeply in a Surface Society. He has delivered keynote addresses at the Museum of the Bible, The Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics, and the Charlotte Mason Institute National Conference, and guest lectures at Reformed Theological Seminary and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He writes at The Beautiful Disruption on Substack, where a growing community gathers around the conviction that paying attention and pursuing beauty are spiritual acts.

He is also an oil painter, a volleyball coach, a husband, and a father who has learned more about hope from his daughters than from any library. He lives in Waxhaw, North Carolina.