There is something amusing about the fact that America’s largest churches are all Episcopalian. Plato, in The Republic, presupposes that the height of society should be its…
At the core of the cycle of life, corruption of innocence and beauty followed by the necessary corrective that makes life whole again, we encounter the self,…
We in the West and those societies worldwide have been disenchanted over the last century seem to be in especial need of re-enchantment and a renewed sense…
No one, we would hope, is wonder-proof, at least not initially. Aristotle tells us that philosophy begins with wonder. We wonder at the world and at ourselves…
Beauty is communal. We know what beautiful architecture looks like. Tourists travel from all over the world to see the buildings of Italy, the Baptistry in Florence,…
Paul Heise. The Wound That Will Never Heal: An Allegorical Interpretation of Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung. Washington DC: Academica Press, 2021. Richard Wagner…
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. —Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” These famous lines…
Aesthetic subjectivism, or “relativism,” is the view that beauty is solely in the eye of the beholder. The term “relativism” is sometimes used to indicate that beauty…
The mystery of the liturgy coincides totally with the mystery of operativity - Giorgio Agamben In my opinion, Giorgio Agamben is the most important contemporary European…
Democratic Aesthetics in Tocqueville In his analysis of democracy Alexis de Tocqueville makes a number of observations about the relationship between political culture and arts. He writes…