Cloisters, New York City
Photo By: Kidist Paulos Asrat
Book Project:
Reclaiming Beauty: Winning Back Our Western Civilization
Reclaiming Beauty aims to document the contribution that beauty has made toward our Western civilization, from the earliest records of God’s love of beauty, to a young child who sees beauty almost as soon as he is born. Our civilization thrived, prospered and matured through beauty. Our great artists, architects, writers, philosophers and scientists have always referred to beauty with awe and wonder. It is in the modern era that beauty began to be undermined and eventually neglected by intellectual leaders.
Reclaiming Beauty will show that abandoning beauty leads to the death of culture, and eventually that of society. Modern man’s neglect of beauty has initiated the cult of ugliness, leaving us with bleakness and nihilism.
Yet, people want beauty. And they will surround themselves with some kind of aesthetic quality. The man on the street may be able to recognize beauty, but he would not be able to explain why it is beautiful. He may desire beauty, but does not know how to attain it. And he is easily distracted by destroyers of beauty. It is the the task of experts to guide him in the right direction.
With Reclaiming Beauty, I will make a historical, cultural and societal review of Western beauty. I will trace the steps when beauty was eventually abandoned as a paradigm for civilization.
Rather than attributing beauty to a Godly goodness, philosophers, writers and artists began to view beauty as their nemesis. They saw God as a judge who would not let them do as they wished. In order to pursue the image of beauty they desired, they began to look elsewhere. They began to abandon God, and by abandoning God, they began to change their world, filling it with horror and ugliness.
The purpose of Reclaiming Beauty is to develop ideas and strategies for bringing beauty back into our Western culture, and to eventually reclaim beauty.