Living Principles: Beauty — A Conversation with Dr. Frederick Turner

In this video from Hieros Institute, Dr. Christopher McIntosh and Dr. Frederick Turner discuss with Dr. Arthur Versluis how vital the principle of beauty is in the formation of cultures, and how contemporary global society is in particular need of understanding and appreciation for it. Dr. McIntosh, in addition to being a well-known scholar of Rosicrucianism and author of Gardens of the Gods, is an accomplished author of pagan fiction. Dr. Turner, an emeritus Endowed Chair Founders Professor, is a widely published scholar and poet, and Dr. Versluis is author of books on a range of topics centering on mysticism, consciousness, and the intersections of religion, spirituality, and literature. 

We also include an ART RECENTERED: A MANIFESTO (pdf here), about which Dr. Turner writes:

In the mid-1990’s, a group of artists, writers and thinkers gathered around the American Arts Quarterly and a few other sympathetic publications, performance groups and exhibition venues, variously characterized as natural classicists, visionary realists, radical centrists, new formalists, or, our favorite, the Derrière Guard. A group of us gathered together at Chesley, the Blue Ridge home of the sculptor Frederick Hart and hammered out the manifesto as it now stands. It has appeared in various publications since. The group at Chesley included the composer-poet Claudia Annis, the anthropologist Robin Fox, the psychologist-poet Frederick Feirstein, Frederick Hart himself, Lindy Hart, and the poet-scholar Frederick Turner, who organized and finalized the full text. Other figures whose ideas and inspirations contributed to the movement were the poets Dana Gioia and Dick Allen, the mathematician-poet Emily Grosholtz, the composer Stefania de Kenessey, the restoration ecologist William R. Jordan III, the biologist Edward O. Wilson, the linguist Stephen Pinker, the artist Jacob Collins, the writer Tom Wolfe, the publisher James Cooper, and several other luminaries.