Ours is an age full of desires but impoverished in its understanding of where those desires lead—an age that claims mastery over the world but also claims to find the world as a whole absurd or unintelligible. In The Vision of the Soul, James Matthew Wilson seeks to conserve the great insights of the western tradition by giving us a new account of them responsive to modern discontents. The western— or Christian Platonist—tradition, he argues, tells us that man is an intellectual animal, born to pursue the good, to know the true, and to contemplate all things in beauty. Wilson begins by reconceiving the intellectual conservatism born of Edmund Burke’s jeremiad against the French Revolution as an effort to preserve the West’s vision of man and the cosmos as ordered by and to beauty. After defining the achievement of that vision and its tradition, Wilson offers an extended study of the nature of beauty and the role of the fine arts in shaping a culture but above all in opening the human intellect to the perception of the form of reality. Through close studies of Theodor W. Adorno and Jacques Maritain, he recovers the classical vision of beauty as a revelation of truth and being. Finally, he revisits the ancient distinction between reason and story-telling, between mythos and logos, in order to rejoin the two. Story-telling is foundational to the forms of the fine arts, but it is no less foundational to human reason. Human life in turn constitutes a specific kind of form—a story form. The ancient conception of human life as a pilgrimage to beauty itself is one that we can fully embrace only if we see the essential correlation between reason and story and the essential convertibility of truth, goodness and beauty in beauty. By turns a study in fundamental ontology, aesthetics, and political philosophy, Wilson’s book invites its readers to a renewal of the West’s intellectual tradition.

Viewing human experience through the eyes of the soul, Bauman offers a profound wisdom steeped in ancient spiritual and philosophical traditions, grounded in modern physics, and capped with his own original soulful vision.

As both an art form and a universal language, the photograph has an extraordinary ability to connect and communicate with others. But with over one trillion photos taken each year, why do so few of them truly connect? Why do so few of them grab our emotions or our imaginations? It is not because the images lack focus or proper exposure; with advances in technology, the camera does that so well these days. Photographer David duChemin believes the majority of our images fall short because they lack soul. And without soul, the images have no ability to resonate with others. They simply cannot connect with the viewer, or even—if we’re being truthful—with ourselves.

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In The Soul of the Camera: The Photographer’s Place in Picture-Making, David explores what it means to make better photographs. Illustrated with a collection of beautiful black-and-white images, the book’s essays address topics such as craft, mastery, vision, audience, discipline, story, and authenticity. The Soul of the Camera is a personal and deeply pragmatic book that quietly yet forcefully challenges the idea that our cameras, lenses, and settings are anything more than dumb and mute tools. It is the photographer, not the camera, that can and must learn to make better photographs—photographs that convey our vision, connect with others, and, at their core, contain our humanity. The Soul of the Camera helps us do that.

“For those for whom conservatism means something more than anti-liberalism . . . who wish to dive deep into the conservative tradition in search of pearls” (The American Conservative). Ours is an age full of desires but impoverished in its understanding of where those desires lead—an age that asserts mastery over the world but also claims to find the world as a whole absurd or unintelligible. In The Vision of the Soul, James Matthew Wilson seeks to conserve the great insights of the western tradition by giving us a new account of them responsive to modern discontents. The western- or Christian Platonist–tradition, he argues, tells us that man is an intellectual animal, born to pursue the good, to know the true, and to contemplate all things in beauty. By turns a study in fundamental ontology, aesthetics, and political philosophy, Wilson’s book invites its readers to a renewal of the West’s intellectual tradition. “Conservatism needs a new prophet. James Matthew Wilson is the man for the job, and The Vision of the Soul is his calling card . . . A new classic. For it we give thanks to God, and to Plato.” —Covenant “James Wilson’s important book returns to a conservatism in the tradition of Burke, Eliot, and Russell Kirk. . . . He wants us to focus on beauty and its place in Western culture. The book is a strong defense of that culture, but not an unthinking one.” —Crisis Magazine “A stirring and timely account and defense of the West’s traditional way of understanding the universe and our place in it.” —Matthew M. Robare, The Kirk Center

Inspirational teacher Alan Seale has helped thousands of people create the lives they want. In Soul Mission, Life Vision he shares ancient and ageless techniques and tools that can launch the process of self-discovery essential to achieving the life of your dreams. Seale has created a program that will lead readers to a "big-picture view" of life, beyond the constraints of any situation. Exercises, meditations and activities that appear throughout the book guide readers through a four-fold process: Self-discoveryDeclaration of mission and visionUtilizing the mind and thought for creationLiving your mission and manifesting your vision in daily life. The goal is to develop the power to make choices out of desire and clarity rather than circumstantial necessity. A powerful synergy will occur when you synthesize that power of choice with your own inner guidance, personal revelation, and life experience. It is that synergy that can lead to profound personal transformation and the full realization of your soul mission, your reason for being.

A compelling defense of the sacred from acclaimed philosopher Roger Scruton In The Soul of the World, renowned philosopher Roger Scruton defends the experience of the sacred against today's fashionable forms of atheism. He argues that our personal relationships, moral intuitions, and aesthetic judgments hint at a transcendent dimension that cannot be understood through the lens of science alone. To be fully alive—and to understand what we are—is to acknowledge the reality of sacred things. Rather than an argument for the existence of God, or a defense of the truth of religion, the book is an extended reflection on why a sense of the sacred is essential to human life—and what the final loss of the sacred would mean. In short, the book addresses the most important question of modernity: what is left of our aspirations after science has delivered its verdict about what we are? Drawing on art, architecture, music, and literature, Scruton suggests that the highest forms of human experience and expression tell the story of our religious need, and of our quest for the being who might answer it, and that this search for the sacred endows the world with a soul. Evolution cannot explain our conception of the sacred; neuroscience is irrelevant to our interpersonal relationships, which provide a model for our posture toward God; and scientific understanding has nothing to say about the experience of beauty, which provides a God’s-eye perspective on reality. Ultimately, a world without the sacred would be a completely different world—one in which we humans are not truly at home. Yet despite the shrinking place for the sacred in today’s world, Scruton says, the paths to transcendence remain open.