Laurence Hilliard's 1876 sketch of Ruskin pausing during a tree-cutting afternoon (Brantwood)
Ruskin Art Club executive director Gabriel Meyer will reflect on practical applications of Ruskin's ideals to lifestyle choices in the 21st century. At the heart of these efforts is Ruskin's concept of "the sufficient life" -- a lifestyle of artful simplicity, mastery of life crafts, imagination, and ethically responsible consumption. Ruskin linked these values to the concept of the good life: "So the things to be desired for man in a healthy state are that he should not see dreams, but realities; that he should not destroy life, but save it; and that he should not be rich, but content." Members of the Ruskin Art Club will be familiar with these ideas not only from Ruskin and Morris, and Thoreau for that matter, but from contemporary thinkers such as Wendell Berry and Paul Kingsnorth. Join us for this reflection and discussion on the promise and the challenge of translating Ruskin's values into practical reality, into the way we live.
Poet-journalist Gabriel Meyer is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has lived and worked throughout the Middle East, the Balkans, and East Africa. His reporter’s diary on the civil war in Sudan, War and Faith in Sudan (Eerdmans), won ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year award for essays in 2006. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in recognition of his work as a journalist by the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology at UC Berkeley in 2017 and by Lancaster University in the UK in 2022. He has been involved with the historic Ruskin Art Club since 1998.