Practicing Mortality

A collaborative undertaking between an artist and a philosopher, this book attempts to deepen our understanding of “contemplative seeing” by addressing the works of Plato, Thoreau, Heidegger, and more. Dustin and Ziegler explore what it means to “see” reality and contemplate how viewing reality philosophically and artfully is a form of spirituality.

Christopher A. Dustin is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy, College of the Holy Cross. Joanna E. Ziegler is Professor in the Department of Visual Arts, College of the Holy Cross.

“Lyric, poignant, thoughtful, and lucid, Practicing Mortality is a masterpiece of the contemplative life… With quiet, beauty-filled humility, and in a seamless blending of voices that rarely occurs, Professors Ziegler and Dustin, art historian and philosopher, return pedagogy to a creative, religious significance and substance that is at once deepening and liberating…Thoroughly American, fully grounded, highly textured, radical in its candor, confident and peace-filled, Practicing Mortality is sure to become a spiritual classic: read, re-read, and read again by everyone who enters its world.”–Therese Schroeder-Sheker, Chalice of Repose Project and The Catholic University of America   
 
 
“Ultimately, the aim of Practicing Mortality is to promote the ability to see differently and ‘to restore our faith in appearances’ . . . The Latin term for this process is mirari, which beautifully evokes both admiration and miracles, as it signifies our ability to gaze in wonder at the extraordinary sights before us. Practicing Mortality not only explicates these processes intellectually, it also performs acts of mirari for its readers- contemplative processes in which practices of admiration become acts of revelation.”– Marcia Brennan, Associate Professor of Art History, Rice University