Mark C. Taylor provocatively claims that contemporary art has lost its way. With the art market now mirroring the art of finance, many artists create works solely for the purpose of luring investors and inspiring trade among hedge funds and private equity firms. When art is commodified, corporatized, and financialized, it loses its critical edge and is transformed into a financial instrument calculated to maximize profitable returns.

Joseph Beuys, Matthew Barney, James Turrell, and Andy Goldsworthy are artists who differ in style, yet they all defy the trends that have diminished art's potential in recent decades. They understand that art is a transformative practice drawing inspiration directly and indirectly from ancient and modern, Eastern and Western forms of spirituality. For Beuys, anthroposophy, alchemy, and shamanism drive his multimedia presentations; for Barney and Goldsworthy, Celtic mythology informs their art; and for Turrell, Quakerism and Hopi myth and ritual shape his vision.

Eluding traditional genres and classifications, these artists combine spiritually inspired styles and techniques with material reality, creating works that resist merging space into cyberspace in a way that overwhelms local contexts with global networks. Their art reminds us of life's irreducible materiality and humanity's inescapability of place. For them, art is more than just an object or process -- it is a vehicle transforming human awareness through actions echoing religious ritual. By lingering over the extraordinary work of Beuys, Barney, Turrell, and Goldsworthy, Taylor not only creates a novel and personal encounter with their art but also opens a new understanding of overlooked spiritual dimensions in our era.

"Sure to provoke heated debate, this book convincingly tells us what we don't want to hear: our colleges and universities are no longer sustainable---either financially or programmatically. Mark Taylor provocatively calls for big changes, both in how we use technology to help deliver educational services and in the role of professors. We should pay attention, or we will pay an enormous price."---Joel Klein, Chancellor, New York City Department of Education

"Mark Taylor---a deeply original scholar and nationally celebrated teacher---sees American higher education as a bubble about to burst. For your students' sake, your teachers' sake, your children's sake and your country's sake, read this book while there is still time."---Jack Miles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of God: A Biography

"This is a book that needed to be written and one that must be read. Mark Taylor not only reveals an unclothed emperor; he also provides guidance to those of us who would properly serve as weavers. The only thing better than reading this book would be to have written it."---E. Gordon Gee, President, The Ohio State University

"One of the jobs of a public intellectual is to warn'us when he sees a fast-approaching freight train bearing down on us. In Crisis on Campus, Mark Taylor does that and much more. He offers specific and often radical suggestions about how to make higher education more fulfilling for students and more relevant to the networked world of the twenty-first century."---Bill Bradley

A provocative look at the troubled present state of American higher education and a passionately argued and learned manifesto for its future.

In Crisis on Campus, Mark C. Taylor---chair of the Department of Religion at Columbia University and a former professor at Williams College---expands on and refines the ideas presented in his widely read and hugely controversial 2009 New York Times op-ed. His suggestions for the ivory tower are both thought-provoking and rigorous: End tenure. Restructure departments to encourage greater cooperation among existing disciplines. Emphasize teaching rather than increasingly rarefied research. And bring that teaching to new domains, using emergent online networks to connect students worldwide.

As a nation, he argues, we fail to make such necessary and sweeping changes at our peril. Taylor shows us the already-rampant consequences of decades of organizational neglect. We see promising graduate students in a distinctly unpromising job market, relegated---if they're lucky---to positions that take little advantage of their training and talent. We see recent undergraduates with massive burdens of debt, and anxious parents anticipating the inflated tuitions we will see in ten or twenty years. We also see students at all levels chafing under the restrictions of traditional higher education, from the structures of assignments to limits on courses of study. But it doesn't have to be this way.

Accommodating the students of today and anticipating those of tomorrow, attuned to schools' financial woes and the skyrocketing cost of education, Taylor imagines a new system---one as improvisational, as responsive to new technologies and as innovative as are the young members of the iPod and Facebook generation.

In Crisis on Campus, we have an iconoclastic, necessary catalyst for a national debate long overdue.

In the fall of 2005, Mark C. Taylor, the controversial public intellectual and widely respected scholar, suddenly fell critically ill. For two days a team of forty doctors, many of whom thought he would not live, fought to save him. Taylor would eventually recover, but only to face a new threat: surgery for cancer. "These experiences have changed me in ways I am still struggling to understand," Taylor writes in this absorbing memoir. "After the past year, I am persuaded that I have done enough fieldwork to write a book that combines philosophical and theological reflection with autobiographical narrative. Writing is not only possible but actually seems necessary."

Field Notes from Elsewhere is Taylor's unforgettable, inverted journey from death to life. Each of his memoir's fifty-two chapters and accompanying photographs recounts a morning-to-evening experience with sickness and convalescence, mingling humor and hope with a deep exploration of human frailty and, conversely, resilience. When we confront the end of life, Taylor explains, the axis of the lived world shifts, and everything must be reevaluated. As Taylor sorts through his remembrances, much that once seemed familiar becomes strange, paradoxical, and contradictory. He reads his experience with and against ghosts from his past, recasting the meaning of mortality, sacrifice, solitude, and abandonment, along with a host of other issues, in light of modern ways of dying. "You never come back from elsewhere," Taylor concludes, "because elsewhere always comes back with you."

Shannon (1951- ) is an American artist perhaps best-known for his "Oxbow" series of sweeping landscape paintings, one titled The Oxbow After Church, After Cole/Flooded..., 1998. In showcasing his highly personal portraits as well as landscapes, Rosenfeld (art history, Marymount Manhattan College, New York) and several other art scholars dispel the misinterpretation of his work as merely a reprise of the Hudson River School. Their essays discuss his themes, work in other media, and the polishing process he developed that infuses his paintings with a luminescent light. The quality oversize volume features his more recent work as well; a chronology; list of selected exhibitions, installations, awards and collections; and a bibliography. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Con la digitalizzazione dei media e la virtualizzazione del mondo, la contaminazione fra stili e culture e la rapidità delle trasformazioni sociali ed economiche, la complessità è divenuta la costante culturale che caratterizza il nostro tempo. Si tratta di una rivoluzione di portata incalcolabile, destinata a sconvolgere l'habitat dell'uomo moderno, il suo modo di vivere e di relazionarsi. Attingendo alla tradizione filosofica del postmodernismo francese e spaziando dall'architettura all'arte, dalle scienze fisiche a quelle biologiche, Taylor traccia una mappa per aiutarci a capire questo nuovo mondo, e ad attraversarlo nel migliore dei modi.

Summarizes traditional treatments for hypertension while outlining natural alternatives that can supplement a program of exercise, stress reduction, and medication. Original.