In a world where the value of a liberal arts education is no longer taken for granted, Mark William Roche lucidly and passionately argues for its essential importance. Drawing on more than thirty years of experience in higher education as a student, faculty member, and administrator, Roche deftly connects the broad theoretical perspective of educators to the practical needs and questions of students and their parents.Roche develops three overlapping arguments for a strong liberal a...

This book probes the intersection of the beautiful and the ugly, offering a systematic framework to understand, interpret, and evaluate how ugliness can contribute to beautiful art.Many great artworks include elements of ugliness: repugnant content, disproportionate forms, unresolved dissonance, and unintegrated parts. Mark William Roche’s authoritative monograph Beautiful Ugliness: Christianity, Modernity, and the Arts, which includes 63 color illustratio...

Why has our preoccupation with concepts, standards, and theories of the beautiful not resulted in a correspondingly comprehensive theoretical treatment of the ugly? Theories of Ugliness remedies this by gathering and scrutinising ideas of the ugly and unsightly from across the history of Western aesthetic and philosophical writing.Taking in ancient, medieval and early modern concepts, all the way through to more recent Anglo-American conceptions, this book...

In Realizing the Distinctive University: Vision and Values, Strategy and Culture, Mark William Roche changes the terms of the debate about American higher education. A former dean of the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame, Roche argues for the importance of an institutional vision, not simply a brand, and while he extols the value of entrepreneurship, he defines it in contrast to the corporate drive toward commercialization and demands for business managem...

Not just another jeremiad against prevailing isms and orthodoxies, Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century examines literature in its connection to virtue and moral excellence. The author is concerned with literature as the teacher of virtue. The current crisis in the humanities, Mark William Roche argues, may be traced back to the separation of art and morality. (When the distinction between is and ought is leveled,” he writes, the power of the professions increase...