Arts & Letters – Spirituality

The new exhibition highlights “how Tibetan Buddhist art practices serve as roadmaps to well-being in times of crisis.” The Rubin Museum of Art in New York City opened their new exhibit, Healing Practices: Stories from Himalayan Americans on March 18, 2022. The exhibit, opening two years after the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic, highlights various healing practices in Tibetan Buddhism that are used to achieve balanced spiritual, physical and emotional well-being....

The final volume of biography by Richardson, who died before finishing it, is a thrilling survey of Picasso’s surrealist era John Richardson opens the final (fourth) volume of his magisterial biography of Pablo Picasso with the artist in more than usual disarray. The year is 1933 and, while his celebrity and his wealth are unassailable, Picasso’s marriage to the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova has entered its bitter endgame. Meanwhile, his...

Buddhist teacher Joan Halifax describes five “edge states” where courage meets fear and freedom meets suffering. I have a small cabin in the mountains of New Mexico where I spend time whenever I can. It is located in a deep valley in the heart of the Sangre de Cristo Range. It’s a strenuous hike from my cabin up to the ridge at more than twelve thousand feet above sea level,...

STEPHEN HAWKING WAS an icon of twentieth-century science, renowned for both his contributions to physics and his inspiring battle against motor neuron disease. But four years after his death, Charles Seife’s Hawking Hawking paints a different picture. As indicated by its provocative title, this book is no hagiography. Seife disparages Hawking on three levels, arguing that his status as a great physicist has been exaggerated, cataloging his various personal failings, and suggesting that...