Moses was not a particularly good speaker. He stuttered; indeed, he needed his brother Aaron to speak for him. Moses did not always obey the law. He murdered an Egyptian taskmaster. He was not always ready to assume responsibility for, and face the consequences of, his deeds. He fled to Midian when the murder became known. Moses refused God's calling at his first encounter with the burning bush, and he continued to doubt God's calling throughout his life as Israel's leader. He directly disobeyed God in more than one instance, and his disobedience resulted in his death; he never entered the Promised Land. In short, Moses does not seem extraordinary. Yet an entire people followed him. They followed him out of Egypt in such a hurry that they did not have enough time to pack their belongings or prepare proper food; they agreed to walk through a sea, and then they spent forty years wandering in the desert. Following Moses made the Israelites into a nation. They complained, they disobeyed, and they even threatened to kill him. Nevertheless, they followed him.Moses is the paradigm of charisma, according to Max Weber. But how could a disobedient stutterer and sheepish murderer be considered the paradigm of charisma? People followed him because they believed he had a gift from God. Because of this gift, he became a political authority, a lawgiver. Charisma is not incarnation: Moses was not divine. He was essentially weak, and he died because of his failures to obey. Moses represents the paradox of charisma: that the extraordinary appears in the ordinary, the mark of the divine in the all too human. Weber finds in Moses an alternative to both the authority of tradition and legal-rational authority; charismatic authority disrupts tradition and legal regimes, acting as a subversive, potentially constitutive force. Yet charismatic authority quickly gives way to new traditional and legal-rational regimes. Moses literally gives the law to the Israelites, transferring his own authority to the regime he instituted.But there is a curious aspect of the Moses story on which Weber does not comment. In the Septuagint and New Testament, Moses is described as “beautiful” (in the Hebrew, Moses is described as tov, “good”). For Moses's charisma to be conceivable to the Greek world, he must be beautiful—his charisma must be aestheticized. In our age, when presence is suspect, when endless semblances abound, must we also say that charisma is always already aestheticized? Is it impossible for charisma to be ordinary, or ugly? The ugly Socrates may have followed his daimon, but he did not lead a people. Even if we read Moses in the Jewish tradition, as good rather than beautiful, does not the biblical text make Moses good and beautiful, wrapping him in narrative elegance, and then wrapping that narrative in the warm glow of tradition?Moses may be the paradigm of charisma, but charisma is now attributed to a wide range of individuals and offices. Martin Luther King Jr. has charisma, as does Brad Pitt. Both Adolf Hitler and Saint Francis, Clarence Darrow and the Dalai Lama, and many a high school teacher have charisma. Charisma marks, or masks, power. Charisma legitimates, but charisma also attracts suspicion. Astride the secular-sacred divide, charisma enchants (its etymology suggests divine gifts). Sociologists associate charisma with the premodern: an irrational, unstable source of authority, superseded by the rational, bureaucratic authority of modernity. Yet charisma remains in the modern world—perhaps it is reinvigorated in the postmodern. Celebrities, lawyers, politicians, and new age gurus all seem aptly labeled charismatic. With stories of secularization increasingly under scrutiny, might the concept of charisma also require reexamination, perhaps rejuvenation?In the context of the burgeoning interest in political theology across the humanities, charisma would seem to offer an alternative narrative, one that no longer takes sovereignty as paradigmatic. Political theology has typically investigated concepts of the state (as Carl Schmitt puts it) that are secularized theological concepts. Charisma is used as a political concept, and it is a secularized theological concept, yet it does not quite secularize into an appendage of the nation-state, as the secularized theological concept of sovereignty may be said to do. It is as if the charismatic individual is gifted directly by God—like Moses, like Paul, like the saints. Charisma remains in a sense unfettered and disruptive, catalyzing social movements rather than securing state power. But is charisma really a secularized political concept? In Weber's dialectic, charisma is a moment that escapes modernity, and then is incorporated back into modernity. Weber's account of charisma appears in tension with his account of secularization. The dialectic of charisma is found everywhere, at all times, no matter how differentiated the social spheres are, no matter what authority religion has over social life.Some would try to explain away charisma with historical or ethnographic description. In the case of Moses, his leadership may be seen to make perfect sense. Moses possesses an insider's knowledge of the Egyptian government and military secrets, as he grew up in Pharaoh's palace; he assumes an outsider's emotional distance, or alienation, from Egypt, as he had to leave because of his youthful crime; and he has a special connection to the Israelites both ethnically and as a matter of class, because of the shepherd's life he led in Midian. Indeed, Moses is attuned to worldly justice. But in trying to make sense of Moses's leadership in this way, we are at a loss to comprehend the magic that accompanies his survival of infanticide, his direct communication with God, the miracles he performs, and the radiance of his face when he descends Mount Sinai. To make sense of such things, the hint of the supernatural that accompanies charisma must be preserved.What remains when the supernatural is taken away from charisma? The simulacrum of charisma is the appearance of otherworldly gifts that are actually this-worldly, promoting self-interest or the status quo. The simulacrum of charisma might be called a tool of idolatry, or ideology. When Moses was on Mount Sinai, the Israelites built a golden calf, a shiny new god literally formed of earthly wealth. With the establishment of the nation-state, with economic, political, and social change accompanying modernity, idolatry becomes ideology. The celebrity emerges, that peculiar figure of modernity who replaces the magician or the apostate. If such a thing as pure charisma stands outside time, charisma's near relatives are very much subject to secularization, from golden calves to gold bling. Charisma seems antithetical to the postmodern. If nothing else, charisma is presence. Representations of charisma are always already sullied: they are not charismatic. Charisma, one might charge, haunts the modern, is projected back into the premodern to purge the ghosts of modernity, but it has no traction whatsoever in a postmodern world without Truth, in a world of resemblances and performances. On this account, all that would be left are the simulacra of charisma; all that would be left is ideology and its virtuosos.But perhaps charisma has always been about performance: about paradigm-shifting performance, about ideology-critical performance. Moses's stuttering attempts to speak God's desires must be interpreted by the priest Aaron, the charismatic performance a representation of a representation spoken by one who is essentially a religious bureaucrat. The layers of representation are part of the drama of charisma. Moreover, holding on to a theopolitical concept of charisma that includes representation may offer a way to talk about charismatic performances that fail, or that are designed to fail—that are designed to offer the allure of transformation, the allure of otherness, while actually securing sameness.Put another way, the continuing relevance of charisma might have to do with the justice of charisma, or the charisma of justice. Moses led his people out of bondage. Even before that, he had a particular sensitivity to injustices: he killed the Egyptian taskmaster whom he saw abusing a Hebrew slave, he tried to intervene when he saw two Hebrew slaves fighting, and he protected the strange Midianite sisters he encountered at the well from the shepherds who bullied them. Might the allure of charisma be the allure of justice: to give each his or her due? Each person who comes into the presence of the charismatic figure finally receives his or her due. The person feels as if the world had left him or her lacking, and now he or she is complete. When charisma is simulacral, so can be that completeness, masking injustice. Celebrity, the paradigm of simulacral charisma, makes the present world seem complete, makes us feel as if we have a place to fit in. While Moses truly transformed the world of the Israelites, celebrities only appear to transform our world. Celebrities make the status quo seem just, whereas genuine charisma opens a world without content, unrecognizable from the perspective of the present except that it will be called just. But as soon as justice is turned into law, it is no longer just.Might the lure of charisma, to justice, also be the lure of the beautiful? The beautiful, too, draws us out of ourselves, though the icon is often confused with the idol, and the seemingly beautiful actually mirrors our own desires. The beautiful, too, can be regularized, normalized, losing its allure—perhaps becoming kitsch. The beautiful, too, is always already represented, performed, yet through those representations and performances shines an evasive presence of otherness, never nameable, yet powerful—and good, and true. Recall the beauty, and goodness, of Moses.This story is much too easy. Consider the case of Martin Luther King Jr., so often portrayed as a contemporary paradigm of charisma, embodying the good, the true, and the beautiful. Does his image not show how race is managed through attributing charisma to media-created “leaders,” ascribing premodern religiosity to racial others while eliding grassroots organizing for racial justice? Critics have argued that claims to gain access to otherworldly authority, to channel the good, the true, and the beautiful, mask, and so reinscribe, racial, gender, and other differences. The relationship between charisma and racial difference can also be seen in the way that Moses's racial identity attracted much debate as secularized scholarship (notably, Freud) bracketed the question of his charisma. But might attentiveness to the drama of charisma, the layered representations animated by a transformative call, result in movement toward justice responsive to varieties of difference?As a group, these articles show the rich potential for charisma beyond sociology, in the interdisciplinary and critical humanities. The concept of charisma clarifies, invites, and incites in our postsecular world. The articles use varied methods, examine varied times, turn to varied places. Karmen MacKendrick and Abbas Barzegar explore charisma in religious traditions, medieval Christianity and Islam, respectively. Paul Kahn and Nicholas Bromell offer theoretical reflections on the political implications of beautiful charisma—in its relationship to law and democracy, respectively. James Manigault-Bryant and Chris Garces reflect on individuals (a black minister for Manigault-Bryant, a Peruvian saint and a black president for Garces) who evidence racialized charisma. Joshua Dubler considers the charisma of a contemporary black celebrity, Beyoncé. As a whole, they query: Is beauty an appropriate term for charisma? Is the moral valence of charisma essentially equivocal? If charisma is both beautiful and suspect, what might this tell us about the traditional status of beauty as one of the transcendentals, bound together with the good and the true? If charisma can indeed be a feature of bureaucratic authority, what does that tell us about the meaning and scope of charisma, or the aesthetics of charisma? Can a government office building, a work of art, or a website have charisma? Can charisma do justice to difference? While each contributor pursues a different line of inquiry, the shared conclusions of the authors are reflected in the title of this collection: “The Beauty of Charisma.”