Tell Them Something Beautiful

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: Rocha's 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 ManifestAs 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 BerkeleySam Rocha's 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. Rocha's 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 today's 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 UniversitySam 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, TexasSamuel D. Rocha is Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Education at the University of British Columbia.