He who has ears to hear – The Lives of Others

By Tony Watkins1 October 20143 February 2017 Film Art, authenticity, Beauty, Death, East Germany, Florian Henckel von Donnersmark, Freedom, German films, Historical Films, History, Love, Martina Gedeck, Morality, Sebastian Koch, Secrecy, Totalitarianism, Trust, Ulrich Mühe

Tony Watkins’s article on Florian Henckel von Donnersmark’s Das Leben Der Anderen (The Lives of Others) on the transforming effect of art and love on an East German Stasi officer.

Art’s Desire: Responding to Film and Literature (part two)

By Tony Watkins30 January 20143 February 2017 Culture, Film, Literature, Writing Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Art, Beauty, C.S. Lewis, Culture, Dostoevsky, Film, Goodness, Human Nature, Media, Sehnsucht, Transcendent Values, Truth, Writing

This is the second in a series of six posts, which was first published as an article in Anvil journal, Volume 28 No 3 (November 2012), and is published here by kind permission of the editor. Two-faced human beings Adam and Eve were tempted by the freedom to make their own moral choices; they wanted…

The Importance of Beauty

By Tony Watkins2 May 20146 February 2017 Media Beauty, Goodness, Greg Wolfe, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Image Journal, Transcendentals, Truth

Greg Wolfe is the founder and editor-in-chief of Image journal, which has just celebrated it’s 25th anniversary. In an interview with Brett Beasley of Curator magazine, Wolfe makes the following observation: One of the key dimensions of beauty that theologians and philosophers consistently refer to is beauty’s disinterestedness. The very nature of beauty is that it…

On Defending Beauty

By Tony Watkins9 September 201024 January 2017 Culture Art, Beauty, Philosophy, Roger Scruton

I was struck by these comments about the loss of beauty in British life by the philosopher Roger Scruton: In the ’50s and ’60s, when my generation was growing up, British people were actively recruited by the educational system and the worlds of art and religion to an aspirational culture. Those were the days…