In Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, Christopher Dawson addresses two of the most pressing subjects of our day: the origin of Europe and the religious roots of Western culture. Click the link below to find this, and other books by Christopher Dawson, in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore! We hope you will join us [...]
Sunday’s New York Times carries a less than astonishing report, following the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s hearings on John O. Brennan’s nomination to be Director of Central Intelligence, that President Obama’s terrorism policies have turned out to be remarkably similar to his predecessor’s. “Obama’s Turn,” the headline runs, “in Bush’s Bind.” Bind? The suggestion [...]
According to the Washington Post, Washington DC’s public school district is planning to close 15 under-enrolled traditional schools: “If we don’t become very serious about marketing and competing with charter schools," [DC Councilman David] Catania said, “traditional public schools, as we know them, will become a thing of the past.” Charter schools have grown quickly [...]
The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope by Roger Scruton. In the excitement (and disappointment) of the politics of hope and change, surely a conservative’s responsibility must be to remind us that change is not the substance of things hoped for, and that reasonable hopes for those concrete goods really within human [...]
I have a small and secret desire, well-hid. Secret from whom, you ask? Secret from me, I suspect, Or maybe I am a suspect, secretly, Quietly desiring. This is the week to bring a secret forth Not by telling, no "big reveal" But quietly, like the secret itself Into the ashes of Wednesday morning. Ashes [...]
In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government by Charles Murray Throughout his long and highly productive career, Charles Murray has done the seemingly impossible. He has melded his strong libertarianism with respect for, and insights from, the work of Robert Nisbet and Russell Kirk. He has trained as a social scientist, worked for the Peace Corps, [...]
Gerhart Niemeyer In my previous essays about teaching in an age of ideology, I had looked at two teachers–Eric Voegelin and Ellis Sandoz–who sought to clear the ideological rubble in the modern academia so students could study the true, the beautiful, and the good. In his accessible lectures about complicated philosophical topics, Eric [...]
A little over a century ago, on August 16, 1911, the great visionary economist E. F. Schumacher was born in the German city of Bonn. An icon of the early Green movement, few people seem to know that Schumacher’s vision was inspired by the great papal encyclicals of Leo XIII and Pius XI or that [...]
When debating communism, I often encounter those who do not know exactly what it is. My answer is the one known by millions and millions: arrest, purge, gulag, and death. That’s communism. But the knowledge of communism gained by those who live under it (that is, those whom communism has not murdered) is vastly different [...]
So everyone’s talking about the article by the intellectual Russell Jacoby on the alleged fact that there are no conservative intellectuals anymore. The article isn’t much good, in fact. One problem is that it doesn’t really explain what an intellectual is. The first outstanding criticism of modern intellectuals came from the lefty philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. [...]
Last November, the political science models that predict presidential-election winners broke. As has long been taught, no incumbent ever wins re-election after presiding over weak recovery from a steep recession and 1.5% yearly economic growth—namely President Obama’s record over his first term in office. So political scientists have to tend to their models. In the [...]
Schall on Chesterton by James V. Schall If G. K. Chesterton is persistently ignored by much of the contemporary intellectual world, he has, I think, no one to blame but himself. After all, he insisted he was nothing but a journalist who wrote for his time, and he did not give a hoot for posterity’s opinion [...]
As with Erasmus, I affirm that The Imitation of Christ by Thomas A’Kempis is the grandest of devotional reads. The devotional books that litter the bookstores, especially the local Christian bookstore are more shaped by the lowest common denominator of trivial therapeutic drivel, the “cutting edge” madness of the management class, or silly self-help books that know [...]
T.S. Eliot By “the Permanent Things” [T. S. Eliot] meant those elements in the human condition that give us our nature, without which we are as the beasts that perish. They work upon us all in the sense that both they and we are bound up in that continuity of belief and institution called the [...]