Beauty has captured human interest since before Plato, but how, why, and to whom does beauty matter in today's world? Whose standard of beauty motivates African Americans to straighten their hair? What inspires beauty queens to measure up as flawless objects for the male gaze? Why does a French performance artist use cosmetic surgery to remake her face into a composite of the master painters' version of beauty? How does beauty culture perceive the disabled body? Is the constant effort to remain young and thin, often at considerable economic and emotional expense, ethically justifiable? Provocative essays by an international group of scholars discuss aesthetics in aesthetics, the arts, the tools of fashion, the materials of decoration, and the big business of beautification—beauty matters—to reveal the ways gender, race, and sexual orientation have informed the concept of beauty and driven us to become more beautiful. Here, Kant rubs shoulders with Calvin Klein. Beauty Matters draws from visual art, dance, cultural history, and literary and feminist theory to explore the values and politics of beauty. Various philosophical perspectives on ethics and aesthetics emerge from this penetrating book to determine and reveal that beauty is never disinterested.

Contains primary source material.

Why do so many women struggle with beauty? This book explores up-to-the-minute research and biblical truths to help you understand why beauty is an important spiritual issue for so many women. In a recent survey, 48 percent of American women said they felt “wholesale displeasure” about their bodies. Many of the rest disliked some part of their appearance, such as their thighs, tummy, or hips. Meanwhile, most Christian women recite what they’ve been taught to believe: how you look doesn’t matter; inner beauty is what counts. The truth is, few women know what the Bible really says about beauty, so we’re at a loss when a daughter reveals an eating disorder, a friend says she hates her body, or we find ourselves anxious about another birthday or another ten pounds. Why Beauty Matters explores current research that has made Newsweek headlines, delves into the breadth of biblical wisdom about beauty, and listens to real women as they struggle with the tough issues that make physical appearance one of the most important spiritual issues of our lives.

What we moderns have forgotten, the ancients knew well: true beauty heals the soul, draws us to God, and yields lasting happiness. Rich with the wisdom of Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, and St. John Paul II, these pages unpack perennial truths about beauty and rivet them into your soul, opening the eyes of your understanding to the beauty all around us. Offering an abundance of accessible examples, author John Mark Miravalle demonstrates that beauty is neither in the eye of the beholder, nor for the cultivated, the dreamer, or the “hopeless romantic” alone. On the contrary, the ability to understand, recognize, and delight in beauty readies all souls for heaven — and makes it easier for us to get there. From these pages, you'll learn: Why beauty is not just a matter of opinion. The virtues we need to perceive beauty and to enjoy it. How to determine whether an artwork is truly beautiful. The respective roles of reason and emotion in appreciating beauty. How the beauty of nature testifies to God's existence . . . while rejection of God obscures nature's beauty. With the help of these pages, you'll receive fresh eyes to marvel again (or for the first time) at the beauty of nature, music, art, architecture, and, most importantly, the beauty of God, the fountainhead and exemplar of all things on earth that are beautiful.

Beauty in architecture matters again. This issue of AD posits that after 80 years of aggressive suppression of engagement with aesthetics, the temporarily dormant preoccupation with beauty is back. This is evidenced by a current cultural shift from the supposedly objective to an emerging trust in the subjective – a renewed fascination for aesthetics supported by new knowledge emanating simultaneously from disparate disciplines. Digital design continues to influence architectural discourse, not only due to changes in manufacturing but also through establishing meaning. The very term 'post-digital' was introduced by computational designers and artists, who accept that digital gains in architectural design are augmented by human judgement and cognitive intuition. The issue takes an interdisciplinary approach to this re-emerging interest in beauty across neuroscience, neuroaesthetics, mathematics, philosophy and architecture, while discussing the work of the international architects, in both practice and academe, who are generating new aesthetics. Contributors: Alisa Andrasek,Izaskun Chinchilla, Marjan Colletti, Peter Cook, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Winka Dubbeldam, David Garcia, Graham Harman, Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto, Alan Powers, Gilles Retsin, Kristina Schinegger and Stefan Rutzinger, Fleur Watson and Martyn Hook and Semir Zeki. Featured architects: Archi-Tectonics, ecoLogicStudio, NaJa & deOstos, Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA, soma architecture, Studio Gang, John Wardle Architects and Tom Wiscombe Architecture.

The notion of beauty is inherently elusive: aesthetic judgments are at once subjective and felt to be universally valid. In Beauty Matters, Anri Yasuda demonstrates that by exploring the often conflicting yet powerful pull of aesthetic sentiments, major authors of the late Meiji (1868–1912) and Taishō (1912–1926) periods illuminated themes and perspectives that resonated broadly in modern Japanese society. This approach presents an alternative to conventional accounts in which Japanese literature before the modernist turn of the 1920s has tended to be defined by an insular focus on subjective representation and autobiographical realism. Yasuda investigates how Natsume Sōseki, Mori Ogai, Mushanokōji Saneatsu and his peers at Shirakaba magazine, and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke sought to identify the aesthetic properties of literature through comparisons with the visual arts. They also considered the position of Japanese cultural sensibilities within the Eurocentric imperial world order. Their stories featuring painters and paintings weigh the fundamental challenge of representing anything when the conditions of knowledge are in flux, and their stories about cross-cultural encounters display both hope and ambivalence about the prospect of cosmopolitanism. Yasuda shows how thinking about beauty and art enabled these authors to surpass purely “literary” concerns. By tracing the wide-reaching significance of aesthetic affect in literary thought, Beauty Matters destabilizes received conceptions of literature’s parameters and affirms literature’s continued potential to intervene in cultural discourses in Japan and beyond.

FINALLY, A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO TEACHING BEAUTY!From classroom d�cor, to poetic infusion, to music and art appreciation, classical Christian education recognizes that students can have a higher aesthetic if teachers model a love of beauty. In this book, you will discover the nature of beauty, and how it relates to ordering the loves of our students, and learn a number of practical ways in which our schools can be spaces of beauty wherein your students' aesthetic sense flourishes.HERE'S A PREVIEW OF WHAT YOU'LL LEARN .... What is Beauty How Beauty relates to cultivating wisdom and virtue 6 ways to incorporate music throughout the school day How to gaze at artwork How to beautify your classroom And much, much, more! With Beauty Matters, you will give your students the resources they need to love what is truly lovely, a gift they can cultivate for the rest of their lives. And that is beautiful! Get your copy today!