A collection of original essays, stories, and musings ranging from religion and politics to art and the everyday, "Things and Stuff" is the first volume of the ongoing, improvisational writings of Sam Rocha. Together, the variety of topics and literary styles reveal a colorful tapestry of life and thought informed by Catholicism, philosophy, fatherhood, attention to the ordinary, and more.

""Sam Rocha's primer reminds me of a French adage: la philo descends dans la rue-- philosophy comes to the street. Rocha's little book can be read and talked about, with profit, on the street, in the home, in the school, in the garden, anywhere the human heart beats and the human mind thinks."" --David T. Hansen, Weinburg Professor in the History and Philosophy of Education, Teachers College Columbia University ""Rocha gives us a compelling experience of first-hand philosophizing, in which the ordinary is shown in its powerful features, and the discipline of philosophy of education reclaims...

Folk is an analog foundation in a digital world. Phenomenology is a big word about a small, impossible task: trying to imagine the real. This book describes this task in relation to its foundation. Most of all, Folk Phenomenology is a defense of the integrity and sufficiency of art--thinking, feeling, living, dying. In short, being in love. "Rocha is a unique and passionate voice of polyphonic resistance in an age of uniform thinking and one-size-fits-all pseudo-solutions. A fearless border-crosser, Rocha thinks like an educational revolutionary and writes like a phenomenological poet. Let...