Beautiful Mystery: Living in a Wordless World
with author Danilyn Rutherford (Wenner-Gren Foundation)
and discussant Dagmar Herzog (CUNY GC, History)

Thursday, October 30th – 5:30pm
Room 6402 (Brockway Room)
The Graduate Center, CUNY

Beautiful Mystery explores what it means to be a person in the spaces between what we can and cannot say, and how we can fight to care for those we love when they don’t have the language to fight for themselves. Through her unique lens as a mother and an anthropologist, Rutherford tells the story of arriving in her daughter Millie’s world, what she found there, and how Millie showed her that words aren’t always what makes us human. Enlightening and deeply felt, Beautiful Mystery proves that you don’t have to understand someone to love them—a lesson that, if we all learned it, might allow us to live together in a fractured world.  

Duke University Press, 2025