...If “fear has been aestheticized” (as urban theorist Sharon Zukin argues), then our conception of beauty, so pivotal to bodies in the cosmopolitan core as well as to selling the world city as “experience museum,” as desirable habitat, must themselves be analytically parsed. This chapter consequently...

...This chapter considers some of the ways one of the most eminent of the Greek Fathers, namely, St. Gregory the Theologian, spoke about the loveliness of the world and examines what motives lay behind his rhetorical celebration of Cosmic beauty in that much-deliberated elegance of the chosen word...

...In discussing beauty, this chapter begins from everyday, ordinary experience, to suggest that ordinariness itself is a constraint we heedlessly impose upon the extraordinary. The chapter begins with the example of the small owl unexpectedly encountered. Such ordinary glimpses of beauty that we...

... action—invokes the notion of depth, he leaves it philosophically unclarified and unexplored. Rendering luminous surface and text alike, this unexamined depth of nature entails both beauty and eternity, as Nietzsche and Camus understood. But as Heidegger, following Hölderlin, as well as Florensky...

.... Cautions in ancient Christianity concerning the beauty of nature are directed not toward its contemplation or even its aesthetic appreciation, but toward the dangers of possessiveness and idolatry in response to natural beauty, whose holiness consists in its saturation with divine energies. Indeed, its...

..., the outer and inner, builds a chain of worlds. It is the revelation and confirmation of oneness. The names Beautiful, Close, Merciful, Most Merciful, Loving, Tender, Forgiving, Giving, etc. are known as the names of beauty, tenderness, abundance, or Mercy. The human response to those names of tenderness...

...By seeing beauty in the figure of woman, man discloses himself. That is his relaxation or sobriety before the possibility of disclosing himself in the outer world. What is disclosed is revealed as separateness from himself. In it he sees a sign about God. To follow the Praiser means to get to know...

.... But that transformation is an ascent to standlessness, or the openness of the heart to fullness and uprightness. Since God is beautiful and since He loves beauty, He reveals Himself as beauty to the one who knows the world. The face of man is opposite the Face of God. And God is oneness. He sees Himself in that human...

...This chapter discusses religious truth, relativism, pluralism, and the beauty of the good. The chapter argues that the major aesthetic advantage that nontheism has is the diversity of aesthetic visions. The secularist can use the same vocabulary to tell tales with radically different flavors...

...The Rilke Alphabet examines key terms in Rilke’s poetry, letters and prose to reveal major themes in his work, such as love, death, immanence, beauty, art, faith, suffering, hope. The book examines controversial words that indicate Rilke’s political commitments, including his short-lived admiration...

... “conversion” in Confessions, a piece of relatively early Christian writing full of consequences for Christian sex. In Socratic teaching, there are no unambiguous transits from the love of one body to all physical beauty, then to minds and customs or institutions and knowledge, so that one can...

...This chapter begins with two ethical ideas in tension: the Platonic and Neoplatonic idea that we must be responsive to beauty, and the Levinasian idea of infinite and irremissible responsibility to and for the other. From the first it takes up the importance of training in attentiveness while...

..., the challenge of an aesthetics of existence is to make your life, in one way or another, a work of art. In contrast, the book argues that art is too narrow a concept to guide this kind of existential project. It turns instead to the more generous notion of beauty, but argues that the philosophical tradition has...

.... This section examines the role of the line in drawing and sketch. It considers Henri Matisse’s concept of the line, the lineal self as desire, and beauty as the design of the true. Also included in this section is a “Sketchbook” of quotations on art from Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Stendhal, Joseph Joubert...

... in order to open up a dimension of experience that is hidden and beyond “normal” experience, something situated at the extremes of experience and thought. He shows how we are always already responding to a prior “call,” whether this is the call of beauty, of other humans, of nature, or even of God...

... libidinal ego original sin suffering consciousness illness individuation Athanasius of Alexandria saint death existence being with false doing regressed ego Zizioulas John the Annunciation Virgin Mary creation empathetic love free will Orthodox Christianity beauty hope Lacan Jacques...

... of beauty, and exemplary or “classic” works of art. Based on an analysis of Kant’s understanding of the exemplary necessity of judgments of taste, and against an interpretive tradition that takes Kant’s claims about the primacy of natural beauty at face value, the chapter argues for the centrality of art...

... of being. If the semantic complex around the core “long” and the verb “to long” is analyzed, it is possible to affirm that it is not separable from meanings such as closeness and similarity, dearness and tenderness, touching and caressing, gentleness and beauty, and the like. In all these relationships may...

... or the uncreated and uncreatable Divine breath in man is His love of beauty. The transformation of the will into love, as man's striving for Peace, includes the recognition of the verticality that begins from each of his states and leads toward fullness. The possibility of such a recognition of man's being...

...The will leads up the steep slope to the Height, so the self is in a state of tension. The first level of love is the presence of beauty. In it, relaxation is revealed as serenity, harmony, and balance. Relaxation and serenity on the first level of love make possible the understanding that every...