In this exciting book, noted cultural scholar and arts advocate D. Paul Schafer examines the powerful role the arts can play, both in helping individuals live more fulfilling lives and in allowing humanity as a whole to enter a new and dynamic period in its history-what Schafer calls a cultural age. Indeed, it is only by moving through that gateway that humanity will be able to overcome the enormous challenges confronting it today.

Schafer surveys new research showing how participation in the arts can help people cope with various illnesses and diseases, come to grips with old age and the final years of life, deal with the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and racial conflicts, and overcome anxiety, apprehension, and depression brought on by lack of human contact, job losses, and uncertainties about the future.

In the author’s view, a new era is opening up-an era in which the arts will soar to new heights, broadening and deepening our collective knowledge and understanding of culture and all the diverse cultures and civilizations in the world, allowing us to realize higher goals, objectives, and ideals for humanity, and yielding more caring, sharing, compassion, and cooperation in the world. Schafer sheds light on this crucial transformation by weaving together a number of articles he has written on the arts over the past several years, updating them in terms of present developments and future needs. The book begins with an examination of the arts as the foundation for life, and ends by considering why the transition to a cultural age is so essential, what it is designed to accomplish, and how it can be achieved.

D. Paul Schafer is the sage we need today. He brings wisdom and guidance about how and why we must live a life filled with arts and culture. He clearly articulates the benefits of an arts-infused foundation for individuals, but also shares the profound positive implications to society when they are collectively valued and used. In one of the world’s most uncertain and catastrophic moments, Schafer has fiercely penned a beautiful and deeply powerful path forward. Embracing humanity’s most potent tools of aesthetics, culture and the arts, he weaves together the threads of social connection, identity, health, learning and well-being. The Arts: Gateway to a Fulfilling Life and Cultural Age is a love letter to the arts and cultures of the world, and importantly an instruction manual for all of her inhabitants. It will make you laugh and cry, reconnecting you to something perhaps missing in your life that you couldn’t name-until now. -Susan Magsamen, Executive Director, International Arts + Mind Lab, Johns Hopkins University

The arts and culture are connectors, in good and troubled times, as seen with COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter, and are as essential to the changing global dynamic as they are nationally. D. Paul Schafer eloquently makes the case for the arts and culture in this accessible, articulate book. We ignore his insights at our peril. -The Honourable Patricia Bovey, FRSA, FCMA, Senator for Manitoba, Senate of Canada

Paul Schafer’s books are much discussed among those of us who strive to use arts activities to drive sustainable positive change-within our lives, workplaces and communities. Paul’s new book is sure to be of great interest for artists, arts organizations and policymakers … at this crucial time and in the years to come. -Grant Hall, founder, League of Cultural Diplomacy