My chapter on art and suffering is now published in the Routledge anthology, Aesthetic Ethics.
It is so great to see this in print! This is the fruit of my research that I did in France during the summer of 2024! Here is my previous post on my work during that summer. What a great summer!
When faced with tragedy, human language often fails, forcing us to admit that there are some experiences that words cannot explain. In this silent space of deep suffering, art has a sole voice as it is able to speak to us in a language all its own. Because of this ability, I will argue that art has an ethical obligation to speak into our sufferings. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s idea that art arises out of silence and Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous claim that art justifies existence, I will first offer further proof for why it is that art must speak of suffering. Next, I will describe how art fulfills this obligation due to its natural use of the vocabulary surrounding suffering including death, brokenness, despair and absurdity as seen in illustrations from the art of the French existentialists, Simone de Beauvoir, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Lastly, I will reveal what art says to us in the midst of suffering to demonstrate its indispensability; for it is the uncompromising message of art which refuses to soften reality while also calling us to action that makes it possible for us to bear the suffering.
I had the opportunity to present a portion of my work on art and suffering, specifically in relation to death, at the American Catholic Philosophical Association hosted at the University of Notre Dame in October 2025
Here is an abstract of the paper:
There is a kind of silence opened up by experiences of death that enters into both personal and political contexts. Because death serves as a crude reminder that there is something not quite right in this world, any effort to explain death will always fall short. We can never provide a satisfying justification for it. This inability of language to respond to death represents a silent gap uncovered in diverse encounters with death. When we lose a loved one early and unexpectedly, the loss pierces us in such a way that our first articulations are to deny that it actually happened. And, even when the death of loved ones comes after a long life, the idea that at least they lived a good, long life does not eradicate our sorrow at their absence. The injustice of death makes us struggle to come up with words to say to someone in a sympathy card or at a funeral. “I’m sorry for your loss” feels empty and cliché and yet better than not saying anything at all. On a political level, the shocking death tolls from the conflicts around us overwhelm us making us speechless. And, despite its inevitability, we avoid the topic of our own death in everyday conversation. The silence evoked by death in all its forms is thus found not only in the way we might abstain from the subject, but also in the fact that the words that are spoken feel bereft of meaning, as if they were nothing.
In this paper, I will argue that art fills in the space left empty by normal language by speaking its own language about death. And while it is no surprise philosophically or experientially that art helps us bear death, I will offer an additional perspective on this by linking the way art speaks out of a general silence to the way it speaks out of the particular silence felt in experiences of personal and political death. To do so, I will first present how art arises out of silence, according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and relate this to the silence of death. Next, I will describe the powerful vocabulary that art uses to speak to death drawing on illustrations found in the art of the French existentialists. Lastly, I will conclude that it is the uncompromising message of art which refuses to soften reality while also calling us to action that makes it possible for us to bear the reality of death. As a note, when I say that art has the ability to do something, I do not mean that every single piece of art does this, but rather that art, as a practice, has this capacity. The characteristics discussed in this paper are not necessarily found (nor should they be found) in each individual work of art.
I presented at the Psychology and the Other Conference at Boston College in September 2025. This conference is always a joy! It is also exciting to see my book being sold at the book exhibit since it is part of the Psychology and Other Book Series.
Here is an abstract of the paper:
In promoting strong mental health, we desire each individual to walk in a state of freedom. Freedom becomes then a goal or ideal that we encourage in our patients and all those around us. And yet, due to its familiarity, we must not forget what it looks like when freedom is deprived, when we are trapped in some kind of bondage, captivity or slavery. To walk in freedom means decidedly not to be enslaved to something or someone and not to be owned by another or controlled by something else. Thinking in terms of art, we know intuitively that art cannot be done under coercion or dictated by another nor can it be done for the sake of an agenda or to spread propaganda. Art may arise out of bondage, and often does, but art cannot be created by the slavery; any art made by those in captivity transcends the bounds of that slavery.
In this paper, I will explicate aesthetic freedom — in other words, I will look to expressions of freedom in art — in order to apply this kind of freedom to goals in mental health. To do so, I will perform a phenomenological analysis on the freedom that exists in art to find its necessary place. I will sketch the relation of art to freedom according to the existentialist accounts of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Albert Camus and Gabriel Marcel. Keenly aware of the experience of bondage due to living through the occupation of France during the Second World War, the existentialists see freedom as saturating all creation of art (such as the writing of a novel or the painting of a still life) and all participation in art (such as the reading of the novel or the viewing of a still life painting) just like it saturates all actions of the human life. Although each thinker heralds freedom as essential to art and life, there are tensions that abound in their accounts of freedom with some privileging an autonomous style of freedom (“radical freedom”) while others emphasizing freedom dependent on others (“situated freedom”). In the larger chapter, I describe how freedom must be present at each layer of the aesthetic experience: in the act of the artist, in the experience of the audience and in the artwork itself, but for this paper, we will be looking solely at the freedom for the artist.
I presented at the International Network of Philosophy of Religion conference which took place in Perugia, Italy on June 11, 2024. It was a wonderful conference connecting with old friends and meeting new ones. The location was beautiful overlooking several small cities including Assisi (where St. Francis was from).
Here is a picture from the back of the hotel.
The conference is both in French and English so I wrote my abstract in both. And like last time, I read my paper in English but read the longer quotations in the original French.
Title: Art Speaks the Unspeakable: Suffering of the World in Aesthetic Expression
Abstract. Responding to the discussion on solitude and tragedy (the “extra-phenomenal”), at our last conference, and reflecting on the crisis of our created world, for this conference, this paper looks to the power of art to speak into the silent spaces of deep suffering. Because there are events where no human language — not even the language of phenomenology — can offer us a satisfying response, art has an ethical obligation to speak to us in the midst of personal and global suffering. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s idea that art emerges out of silence, I will first offer further proof for why it is that art must speak of suffering. Next, I will describe how art fulfills this obligation due to its facility with the vocabulary surrounding suffering, for example, death and brokenness, as seen in illustrations from the art of the French existentialists, Simone de Beauvoir, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Lastly, I will present what art says to us in suffering to demonstrate its indispensability; for the uncompromising message of aesthetic expression reveals to us the fullness of reality, the hard and the good, unlike anything else.
L’art dit l’indicible: souffrance du monde dans l’expression esthétique
Le résumé. Répondant à l’échange sur la solitude et la tragédie (le “Hors-phénomène”), lors de notre dernière conférence, et réfléchissant sur la crise de notre monde créé, pour cette conférence, cet article se penche sur le pouvoir de l’art de parler dans les espaces silencieux de la souffrance profonde. Parce qu’il y a des événements où le langage humaine — même le langage de la phénoménologie — ne peut pas nous offrir une réponse satisfaisante, l’art a une obligation éthique de nous dire quelque chose au milieu de la souffrance personnelle et globale. Faisant appel à l’idée de Maurice Merleau-Ponty selon laquelle l’art émerge du silence, j’offrirai tout d’abord une preuve en plus du fait que l’art doit parler de la souffrance. Ensuite, je décrirai comment l’art remplit cette obligation par sa richesse de vocabulaire du domaine de souffrance, par exemple, la mort et le monde cassé, comme le montrent les illustrations des arts des existentialistes français, Simone de Beauvoir, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre et Albert Camus. Et enfin, je présenterai ce que l’art nous dit dans la souffrance pour démonter sa nécessité ; car le message intransigeant de l’expression esthétique nous révèle la plénitude de la réalité, du dur et du bien, contrairement à toute autre chose.
I have been accepted to present the paper, “Virtual Church and Virtual Symphony: Considering the Importance of Bodily Presence,” at the Psychology and the Other 2021 Conference. It will be virtual this year, but I am still looking forward to it. If you would like the longer version or a copy of the paper, please contact me.I will be covering similar material to be my published article on liturgy, “The Weight of Bodily Presence in Art and Liturgy” (see the post here and download the pdf here).
Here is the short abstract:
This paper weighs in on the question of virtual church, particularly on whether or not liturgy can be done virtually. We will approach our subject from an unusual perspective by looking first to aesthetic experiences, such as watching a virtual symphony, and then relate them to liturgical experiences, such as attending virtual church. Art and liturgy are linked in that they both have the unique ability to facilitate presence, to make something known to us in a new way so that we walk away changed. I argue that what art teaches us about the importance of the body applies to the practice of liturgy and that, while unexpected benefits will surface in virtual settings, nothing replaces the powerful experiences that arise when the body is physically present.
Through Wonder 