Everything Is Holy Now by Randall Auxier It’s a line from Peter Mayer‘s song “Holy Now.” There is a longing for the holy, whatever it is. But the connection between holiness and beauty has been a problem for Western (and some Eastern) religions. If we worship what cannot be seen, what happens when we actually…
Out of the Pure Blue by Randall Auxier Every time I go to central Texas I am amazed by how ugly and hateful the grackals are. But this bird shimmers and shines iridescently and is often the color of deep indigo, which many regard as the most beautiful blue there is. Something has gone awry…
Years ago John Dewey wrote a book about the relationship between democracy and education, making the claim that the former relies upon the latter. Without an educated citizenry democracy cannot survive. I have been harping on the same theme for many years now and am saddened to say that Dewey was spot on. We are…
American Beauty by Randall Auxier Crispin Sartwell‘s book Six Names of Beauty is probably the broadest study of the idea of “beauty” ever written. It covers six different languages and their cultures (English, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, Japanese, and Navajo), but also ranges across dozens of fields of meaning departing from each. Each chapter…
Co-Author: Laura J. Mueller It has become all too normal that what the average American citizen refers to as a “national tragedy,” such as police-initiated homicides of the unarmed, or mass shootings, is treated in predictably routine, hollow fashion. The oxymoronic tension between the tragedy and its therapeutic treatment is the New American Norm. The…
The decade of the Harlem Renaissance was not only an important moment in American cultural history but, as Langston Hughes writes in his autobiography The Big Sea, it was a time in which even “the Negro was in vogue.” Hughes gives a vivid description of how precarious the social situation had become White people began…
Current events point to a future that forces whiteness into a state of chronic self-irritation. This week we have seen Muhammad Ali is being honored and memorialized no differently than a head of state. In his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, he went from not being able to enjoy the use of equal facilities or sit…
The steadfast persistence of racism is particularly acute in an America which has found no way or means of honestly dealing with this flabbergasting inhumanity. Was there ever a council for truth and reconciliation, such as was the case at the end of South African apartheid? Have any attempts at across the board, non-discriminatory reparations…
Most roads do not lead to Rome-that is the situation, European: recognize it (Sloterdijk, Bubbles, p. 75). Dr. Christopher Davis argues in her book Savage Minds that an ethnocentric, colonial mentality still shapes the way we think about Africa. She writes, “We are subject to “African exceptionalism”: a sense that Africa is so different, so…
In his widely read 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued that the end of the Cold War signaled the ushering in the “post-political.” In the true spirit of G.W.F. Hegel’s (1770-1831) philosophy of history, he concluded that all of history was destined to develop toward the…