Beauty At Work Can Beauty Save the World? with Charles Taylor, Sean Kelly, Elaine Scarry, Richard Kearney
This is the opening panel for the international symposium "Can beauty save the world?" held at McGill University, Montreal, Oct 24-25, 2025.
We begin with introductions from Dan Cere (McGill), Brandon Vaidyanathan (Catholic University of America), Charles Taylor (McGill), and Tara Isabella Burton (Catholic University of America), followed by a panel discussion between Sean Kelly (Harvard), Elaine Scarry (Harvard), and Richard Kearney (Boston College), moderated by Bill Barbieri (Catholic University of America)
Sean Kelly reflected that beauty moves us beyond ourselves. It saves us from the flattening of meaningful differences. To encounter beauty is to order one’s life around the object of love. When we long for others to share in that recognition, we glimpse beauty’s political potential—it calls us into conversation rather than conflict.
Elaine Scarry deepened that insight, reminding us that the opposite of beauty is not ugliness, but injury. Beauty and justice both arise from a sense of fairness and the desire to repair harm. Beauty’s lasting impact, she noted, is generative—it makes us want to create.
Richard Kearney drew on Gerard Manley Hopkins’s image of the “pied” world—speckled, varied, alive with difference. Beauty, he said, is not pure symmetry but aftering: it often arrives through suffering and loss, reconciling the universal and the particular.
And Charles Taylor reminded us that beauty cannot be defined apart from itself. Its relation to truth is reciprocal, not hierarchical. To understand one, we must hold the other in view. “That,” he said, “is how beauty can save the world.”
The symposium was sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation.
Learn more at www.canbeautysavetheworld.com and www.beautyatwork.net
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