Aesthetic images increasingly organize social relationships. Theorizing the constitutive potential of the aesthetic is a worthy task for communication and rhetorical scholars. This article integrates rhetorical methods with the critical instruments of Visual Theory to offer a comprehensive account of the relationship between the aesthetic image, social formations, and cultural constraints. I do so by analyzing the rhetoric of Joel Osteen, a popular evangelical minster. Osteen employs aesthetic rationales to construct an Imaged Other capable of separating what he calls God's favored from the unfavored. By deliberately featuring aesthetic dimensions including physical attractiveness, body shape, posture, hygiene, and de´cor, Osteen's discourse lends insight into an increasingly important way our social relationships are organized.Our social worlds are increasingly organized by the aesthetic image. The dominant mode of expression upon which meaning is created and exchanged now occurs on the terrain of the visual: Elementary schools teach fourth graders PowerPoint rather than critical writing and laud attractive presentations that get basic facts wrong; our houses of worship have learned to attract younger members by exchanging the substance of theological rigor and pious asceticism for the aesthetically pleasing spectacle; businesses increasingly use the aesthetic as the primary tool for generating sales and profit. And in politics, an understanding or why Sarah Palin and not Chris Christie has as much to do with hairlines and waistlines as it does with policy statements and political experience (Brummett, 2008, p.