Tell Them Something Beautiful: Essays and Ephemera

by Samuel D. Rocha

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 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 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 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.

225 pages, Paperback

Published April 20, 2017

Reviews

[David Mosley · Rating 5 out of 5]

To say I read Sam Rocha’s Tell Them Something Beautiful would be incorrect. I devoured it like a man who hasn’t eaten in weeks. I ravished it like a husband who sees his wife for the first time after a long absence. I will need to return to this book to savor it, fortunately, it is a book that will bear re-reading.

I write this review with something of a smirk. When Sam’s Folk Phenomenology came out he let people know he was looking for reviewers. I offered, received my copy, and still have neither reviewed nor read it. You can believe, however, that it has moved higher up on my to read list now that I’ve read Sam’s collection of essays.

Tell Them Something Beautiful is subtitled Essays and Ephemera as it is composed of essays and blog posts Sam has written over the last 8 years or so (actually, I think it is closer to 6 or 7, the oldest I can recall is from 2010 and the most recent from 2016). Sam organizes many disparate––and some interconnected––essays around four foci: Discontents and Diagnosis, the Ordo Amoris, Teaching as Deschooling, and Funk Phenomology. Despite the essays being written at different times and in response to different cultural events, or simply occasioned by whatever struck him that day, Sam masterfully and intentionally lays them out in a way that leads us to a certain end. There seems to be something Sam desperately wants us to understand: death.

I first realized this when I read Sam’s essay “A Curriculum of Life.” Here Sam lays out his plans for deschooling his children, especially Tomas who was around 5 or 6 when the essay was first written. Toward the end of the essay, Sam asks, “But when do we prepare for life and death? For theosis?” As one who has written and published on the subject of deification I had to stifle a loud “Yes!” when I read this line. Education is meant for human formation, not to the end of finding a job but for the Beatific Vision. And of course, for most of us, we will not get to the Beatific Vision, to deification, without the help of Sister Death, as St. Francis called her.

[Steven Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a damn good book. Wish he'd added his essay about Beyonce's halftime show.