Post Tagged 'Beauty'

May 21, 2024

Bare Ruined Choir Schools

My news feed early last month included updates on an ongoing drama involving two animals, both from endangered species. Zookeepers in Fort Worth and in Cleveland breathed a sigh of relief when Jameela, a western lowland gorilla born at the Fort Worth Zoo that had been abandoned by her mother, was accepted by Freddy, a Cleveland gorilla who has successfully fostered orphaned and abandoned gorillas before. Continue Reading...

November 15, 2021

Does Hollywood love beauty more than profit?

Beauty has the power to spellbind everyone—the proof is Canadian director Denis Villeneuve. His last three movies, Dune (2021), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), and Arrival (2016), have earned him a reputation as a visionary and a sensitive director, despite science fiction as his genre, which normally is considered either too sophisticated for the broad audience to follow or too simplistic to be worth attention, instantly forgotten. Continue Reading...

July 13, 2020

Beauty: the indispensable support of liberty

In modern college art classes, anyone daring to defend the idea that objective beauty exists will be branded as intellectually inferior. Yet beauty has undergirded Western culture from its very genesis. Continue Reading...

June 26, 2020

The world will be saved by beauty: Singing, worship, and COVID-19

“Singing? I’ve heard that’s even worse than coughing!” That remark, and the horrified tone of the well-intentioned woman from my local church who made it, echoes inside many congregations these days. Continue Reading...

January 15, 2020

Why Scruton matters

The late Sir Roger Scruton, the eminent philosopher of aesthetics, politics, liberty, and culture, returned home to his Creator last Sunday. Scruton was famous, among other things, for running an underground university for Czechoslovakian dissidents during their country’s communist regime while teaching them Western philosophy, history and literature. Continue Reading...

July 31, 2019

Simon Leys on Christopher Hitchens, Mother Teresa & “The Empire of Ugliness”

One of my favorite contemporary writers is Theodore Dalrymple, whose essays I first discovered in The New Criterion about 20 years ago. He wrote that one of his favorite writers, who also had a pen name, was the essayist and critic Simon Leys who died in 2014. Continue Reading...

January 25, 2018

Is the rise of ‘creative entrepreneurship’ killing the arts?

Capitalism is routinely ridiculed as an enemy of the “true artist,” with much of the finger-pointing bent toward profit and efficiency. Such forces, we are told, inevitably cause creators to drool only for money, care nothing for beauty, and cater exclusively to common consumer tastes. Continue Reading...

July 17, 2017

Arvo Pärt on the economy of wonder

Our society has grown increasingly transactional in its ways of thinking, whether about family, business, education, or politics. Everything we spend, steward, or invest — our money, time, and relationships — must somehow secure an immediate personal return or reward, lest it be cast aside as “wasteful.” Continue Reading...

May 19, 2017

Video: John Mark Reynolds on beauty and the destruction of the individual

On April 27th, we were pleased to welcome John Mark Reynolds, president of the St. Constantine School, to speak on the topic of “Beauty and the Destruction of the Individual” as part of the 2017 Acton Lecture Series. Continue Reading...

April 07, 2016

Finding meaning and beauty as a fast food worker

“This is not what I thought I’d be doing at twenty-seven.” So says Stephen Williams, who, while enjoying and appreciating much of his daily work at his local Chick-fil-A, continues to feel the various pressures of status, mobility, and vocational aspiration. Continue Reading...

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