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| Category: Body, Mind and Spirit |
(requires Adobe Reader)
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| About the Book | |
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Why do liberals and conservatives differ so consistently on such varied issues? Why do people fight so bitterly over political and religious issues? Don’t our shared human interests outweigh our differences? Tom Lovett looked for answers in the natural sciences, in the social sciences, and in the humanities. Over time, he linked key knowledge from those three sources into a theory of the art of living, a theory that honors our shared human interests. Select Quotations on the Art of Living (2024) outlines that theory and uses quotations from eminent authors to illustrate it. His earlier book, Creating Beautiful Lives (2020), presents details of the theory. In the proposed theory, we learn skills in the art of living and create beautiful lives by doing three things:
We become artistic by refining a skill sufficiently. We become scientific by evaluating a theory rigorously and finding it adequately reliable or false. We become religious by devoting ourselves thoroughly to an activity, idea, group, or interest, and/or by joining an organized religion. We can learn everyday forms and specialized forms of art, science, and religion. Everyday forms modify our basic behavior, and everyone can learn them. The specialized forms are fine art (painting, sculpture, writing, singing, music, dance, theater, and many more), social and natural science, and organized religion. Everyone can value those specialties and choose whether and how to participate in them. The proposed theory reconciles realism about our animal nature with idealism about our highest human potential. The art of living becomes our way of life, and the human species becomes one human family. We live in peace and harmony with one another, with other species, and with nature. We are at home on the earth and in the universe.
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| About the Author | |
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Tom Lovett is an independent researcher and a generalist. He has a BA in Political Science from Cornell College and an MBA from Northern Illinois University. His career in Wisconsin state government was in health care reform. He and wife, Anne, live in Madison, WI. |