Tell Them Something Beautiful: Essays and Ephemera

A collection of essays composed during the Obama presidency on politics theology art and education. Social and political critique pastoral philosophy postmodern theology deschooling art and folk phenomenology: Rochas essays in Tell Them Something Beautiful cover a range of topics and ideas held together by his literary style and integrated point of view. In this collection Sam Rocha wanders far and wide and the wandering is a virtue. Sometimes peregrinations are pilgrimages ways of seeking out truths that have been scattered or hidden far from the main roads. What unifies these pieces for all their mercurial diffuseness is a deeply contemplative intelligence a lyrical voice and a keen eye for the telling detail. --David Bentley Hart fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Studies; author of The Hidden and the Manifest As the essays blog posts and talks in this book demonstrate Sam Rocha is a philosopher/contrarian or contrarian/philosopher for our time. Nimbly shifting from politics to religion to music race and culture Tell Them Something Beautiful is a symphony in many movements: lyric and occasionally barbed but mostly soaring. --Kaya Oakes UC Berkeley Sam Rochas essays in this always intriguing informative and entertaining collection represent something new and cutting-edge on the U.S. Catholic intellectual scene. Here we have a Tex-Mex Catholic educator philosopher with more than a little literary and scholarly flare. Rochas creativity and imagination together with his ability to find the right word or analogy to make his often surprising points make this book a treat for anyone who cares about the life of the mind as well as the soul in todays ugly and fear-ridden climate. Read--even on the fly if you have to--these snappy crisp essays that never fail to fill the mind and the heart. --Allan Figueroa Deck SJ Distinguished Scholar of Pastoral Theology and Latino Studies Loyola Marymount University Sam Rocha does not write to let us know what he thinks; his writing is more human than that. Reading his essays and ephemera you watch him chisel away at what we have all seen and thought at one time or another in fleeting ways. He chisels--and by reading we chisel--at these things before they get embedded beyond recognition in the stony disembeddedness that pervades our sensibilities. There is an evident ache at the heart of this kind of writing. --Most Rev. Daniel E. Flores STD Bishop of the Diocese of Brownsville Texas Samuel D. Rocha is Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Education at the University of British Columbia.