First, that Sa‘di’s love poetry is imbued with homoeroticism, as evoked by the beloved boy in the bathhouse.

Ingenito rightly pushes back both on contemporary western and Iranian critics who either try to ignore the inter-generational homoeroticism or to characterize it as purely metaphorical. New places are full of discovery, whether they be with picturesque landscapes or cozy restaurants with artistic nooks. Instead, He wants to align our hearts and minds so that they pull together rather than fight each other. One person may find a Degas ballerina sculpture beautiful, while another might just see it as a metallic girl.

Beholding Beauty encompasses all corners of the globe, collecting stories, indigenous cosmetic practices and plant-derived recipes from rural women living at the world’s ancient crossroads, cultural melting pots that have produced an astonishing spectrum of beauty over the years that have also witnessed the trade of luxury products, ideas and spiritual worldview for millennia.

To top it all off, God the Creator filled the natural world with wonders, from galaxies to glistening dragonfly wings. In particular the critical theory language seems to be a good way to look at Avicena’s and Gazali’s aesthetics. In a prayer that at first glance sounds a bit “soft” for a warrior, David asked to see God’s beauty: “One thing I ask from the Lord, this only do I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple” (Psalm 27:4). But in spite of his handsome looks, God warned Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him.

is best known to many for his Gulistān ( The Rose Garden), a prosimetrum that meditates on how the individual can navigate a path through political, spiritual and romantic relationships, and face mortality with grace.

With spectacular photographs, this historic volume provides insightful portraits of the Horn’s women, guardians of ancient wisdom, and captures every intricate detail and fine nuance of their arts of beauty and wellbeing, set against a vivid backdrop of some of the region’s most archaic and pristine landscapes. Like other materials on Serendip, it is not intended to be "authoritative" but rather to help others further develop their own explorations. Until I was about seven or eight, my friends and I would insist that Jon play with us, usually in some form of torturous make-believe. We are member-supported, so your donation is critical to KCRW's music programming, news reporting, and cultural coverage. The well-known culture critic Judith Butler, chided for using overly baroque vocabulary and syntax, once explained that the point of difficult prose is to make you think harder about what you thought you understood, to force you to discover something new.Each place had pieces of classical beauty but they also had unadorned pieces which I found exceptionally beautiful because of what they meant. Instead, God ordained a lavish system of corporate worship for the early Hebrew tribes (see Exodus 25). In Beholding Beauty: Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry, Domenico Ingenito explores the unstudied connections between eroticism, spirituality, and politics in the lyric poetry of 13th-century literary master Sa‘di Shirazi.