Diana Chapman Walsh, president emerita, Wellesley College; trustee emerita, Amherst College; life member emerita, MIT Corporation
Contemplative Beholding: A Way of Life and Love is an inspiring journey into the art of beholding, of recognizing and fully savoring the moments given to us in our brief lives to behold in such way that those moments will remain with us as sacred endowments. Upton extends this invitation “to anyone interested in discovering or rediscovering those enduring joys that will redeem the necessary sadness of human being.” How could anyone resist the enormity of what’s on offer here?
This book, however, makes no small demands upon its reader to summon the sensibilities, passion, and, above all, the patience infused in Upton’s writing. In that sense, the medium is in part the message. The demands Contemplative Beholding makes from the very outset—Where is that image he is talking about? What on earth is he talking about?—are part of the learning. In the end, the book more than repays the effort.
Here is just one of Upton’s many heart-stopping observations: “Our human trajectory since the turn of the fifteenth century seems to have brought us to a point of shared desolation, which the superficial charisma of our dazzling accomplishments only partially obscures.”
This is an amazing book, a unique book (and I don’t use that word lightly), a book filled with erudition, insight, and, yes, eros, a great abundance of love. I loved the book.
I am deeply grateful for this active integration of embodied contemplative beholding, art, and love—which, as Upton says, is “our best alternative to the destructive meanness that weighs upon us all.” Nothing could be more important at this perilous time in our history.
Mirabai Bush, founder and senior fellow, Center for Contemplative Mind in Society
This is an important book! Most contemplative scholars have favored working with text over image. Joel Upton has developed a form of contemplative engagement with images based on ancient methods of learning from art fused with contemporary technology to guide us in the act of “beholding.” Challenged by the visual limits of the printed page, in Contemplative Beholding: A Way of Life and Love he takes us beyond the confines of the book to the illuminated digital presence of a painting, helping us learn to behold, to bring a painting to life. Using the beholding practice with the digitally illuminated image, we can form a relationship with a painting or other work of art leading to an intimate form of understanding: direct perception or insight. It makes beholding relevant outside the museum, even outside the classroom. With the book and the images, we can engage with the painting and its truth anywhere. Upton’s work along with that of Arthur Zajonc, Steven Rockefeller (Middlebury), Barbara Dilley (Naropa), Linda Susan Beard (Bryn Mawr), Marilyn Nelson (UConn), Brad Grant (Howard) and so many others, is creating an academic environment in which students can understand their subjects more deeply while discovering meaning in their own lives.
Mohammed Hamid Mohammed, senior program officer, Fetzer Institute
Reading Contemplative Beholding: A Way of Life and Love is a thoroughly engaging and satisfying endeavor. Dr. Upton elegantly weaves his deeply personal experience with his knowledge of art history and a range of disciplines. He presents his argument not so forcefully as to unsettle—but rather as a generous sharing of his wisdom that sedimented and percolated over decades—by inviting the reader into a contemplative beholding of the many art works and literary jewels he includes in the book. Most of all, what I found compelling is that love is the energy and the center of that intimacy, the ground zero of knowledge and relationships.
Parker Palmer, author, educator, activist; founder and senior partner emeritus of the Center for Courage and Renewal
Author of The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher (1997), 2007; A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward and Undivided Life, 2004; The Heart of Higher Education: A Call to Renewal, 2010 (coauthored with Arthur Zajonc)
From where I sit, Contemplative Beholding: A Way of Life and Love speaks to one of the most challenging and important goals for American higher education. In my own words, that goal is to open the classroom and the academic enterprise generally to a range of excluded epistemologies or modes of knowing. To call Upton’s book “creative” and “original” is to understate the case, I think. I regard his approach as extraordinary, unlike anything I have seen during my forty years of engagement with these issues.
The “objectivist” epistemology that has dominated American higher education has either marginalized or driven out the epistemological challenges posed by traditional disciplines such as art and music; by contemporary reformulations such as quantum mechanics; and by upstart disciplines such as black studies and women’s studies. And because there is a “trickle-down” effect from epistemology to pedagogy to ethics, the dominance of “objectivism” has had unfortunate implications for the latter two fields—resulting in pedagogies that distance students from the worlds they study, and an ethic (or anti-ethic) among parts of the educated class that relieves them from responsibility for those worlds.
This, in brief, is why I enthusiastically support Upton’s effort to “animate human imagination of all kinds in the deliberate act of contemplative reconciliation of contradictory realities.” Implicit in his approach, I believe, is a demonstration—rooted in both scholarly and pedagogical practice—that these “contradictory realities” are, in fact, paradoxical, with “the sensual” and “the cerebral” (as Upton names them) complementing each other and leading to a fuller form of knowing, teaching, learning and living. Contemplative Beholding is, in my experience, unique (or nearly so), and kindred books may be hard to find.
Rowland Abiodun, John C. Newton Professor of Art and the History of Art, and Black Studies, Amherst College
Author of Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art, Cambridge University Press, 2014
Contemplative Beholding: A Way of Life and Love invites the reader to ask the very difficult question: What really preceded the word and the image? How do we make sense of that energetic substance that has eluded most scholars, especially when they become all too entangled and entwined with traditional art historical methodologies?
Contemplative Beholding challenges the reader but also lifts them to confront the “art” of art. Therein lies the imperative—to embark on a “spiritual journey.” We experience a transformation in the way we behold art and see ourselves in it.
This is a fresh vision of the works of art with which we may already be familiar.
I laud this effort in piecing together the very fabric of notable artworks in all their constituent parts to remind us that their inherent power lies within their response to human experience.
Susan Burggraf, chief academic officer, Naropa University
I experienced Joel Upton’s Contemplative Beholding: A Way of Life and Love as an invitation into the vast potential found when we cultivate a gaze that is soft, open, and precise, the gaze of love. This is the child-like gaze of the mature meditator. Upton leads the patient novice and expert alike to realize the grand, sweet, entirely accessible world-within-this-one of profound spirituality. With the speed and degradation of awareness that comes from saturation in the disembodied and unkind superficiality of many of the offerings of popular culture, Upton’s work restores appreciation of and access to our human capacity to understand and to see fully as leading surprisingly to love, the key to living whole.
This book unlocks the lifetime of discovery that the marriage of arts and humanities with contemplative practice heralds. Reading it and practicing the lectio divina that it encourages might best take place over a lifetime. As we behold the images, the text carefully walks through the literary, historical, and philosophical perspectives that invite us to a more complete appreciation all the way through, to a turn that stops the mind and leaves us again and again in a place of awe.
Since I don’t have the eloquence to express the fullness of the experience, my eyes soften with tears as I feel the unlikely joy and humor and just-so completeness of seeing that developed and somehow didn’t leave me as I engaged with Joel Upton’s Contemplative Beholding: A Way of Life and Love.
I will recommend this book widely among my colleagues at Naropa, a contemplative university. While there are now many articles and books about contemplative education, Upton’s is unique in offering complete access to the heart of liberal education to the genuine student in all of us.