This semester at Benedictine College I’ve been pioneering a new course for my Angelico Fellows: it’s called, The Experience of Beauty. For those of you who would like to “take the course” remotely, I’ll be writing about it here, on Beauty Matters, over the next couple of months. Feel free to spread the word if you know anyone who cares about these things.
But, in essence, The Experience of Beauty had three, multi-week units:
1) “The Crisis of Beauty” (wherein we read Walker Percy, Byung-Chul Han, Marc Augé, and John Berger);
2) “Deep Calls to Deep”: What was Beauty, Anyway? (in which we read Plato, Tolkien, and Lewis).
And…
3) “Living Beauty.” In this third part, I wanted to provide my students with examples of writers and artists who are alive or have been alive within their lifetimes (Roger Scruton, Dana Gioia, Wendell Berry, Gjetrud Schnackenberg, Christopher Alexander…) to provide them with models of living beauty, but also to help them think about how they could incorporate beauty into their own lives.
It was in this part of the course where we not only discussed the English essayist and novelist Paul Kingsnorth, but actually had class with him. Kingsnorth was able to join me and my Angelico Fellows remotely from his home in Ireland to talk to us about his vocation as a writer, give advice to aspiring writers, describe his conversion to Christianity, and tell us about his next project (even after Against the Machine, which comes out from Penguin next fall).
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