Shelby Tankersley by W. Winston Elliott III The Imaginative Conservative is pleased to announce Shelby Tankersley has joined our staff as Assistant Editor. Ms. Tankersley is a recent graduate from the Honors College of Houston Baptist University, where she studied Philosophy and Government. Her experience includes writing for the Intercollegiate Review, completing the Intercollegiate Studies Institute [...]
The Imaginative Conservative Senior Contributors: Cyber Inklings W. Winston Elliott III, founder and grandmaster of The Imaginative Conservative, recently posted a collage of all of the Senior Contributors to The Imaginative Conservative. It’s quite a picture, and it’s more than a bit humbling as well as inspiring. As I was looking at it, [...]
The present age has seen a great slump in humanist values. After dominating Western culture for four centuries humanism today is on the retreat on all fronts, and it seems as though the world is moving in the direction of a non-humanist and even an anti-humanist form of culture. This tendency is most clearly visible [...]
Dr. Eva Brann The Imaginative Conservative extends a warm welcome to our new Senior Contributor, Eva Brann. Dr. Brann is a tutor at St. John’s College, Annapolis. She joined the St. John’s faculty in 1957 and served as the Dean from 1990 to 1997. Dr. Brann is the author of numerous works on Greek poetry and [...]
What does the conservative gentleman wear? As there is no ideology for the conservative in politics, neither is there in dress. But the examples of Russell Kirk and other historical figures may guide us. Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets. –Anthony Burgess [...]
Raphael’s School of Athens The humanities in American higher education are in deep crisis, and the cry of alarm released on June 18 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences will probably contribute little to a renaissance. How deep is the crisis? Here a few warning signals. According to the New York [...]
Does John Locke offer enduring principles of political philosophy that harmonize with the conservative tradition? One of the puzzling trends in contemporary American conservative thought is the insistence that John Locke and conservatism as outlined by Russell Kirk have little to do with one another. Conservative critics have accused Locke of promoting materialistic individualism, unprincipled [...]
Donald Davidson Confident that industrial prosperity would create the material foundations for a vigorous, democratic civilization in the South, southern liberals since the 1880s had repudiated much of their heritage and embraced science and industry as the salvation of mankind. Liberal educators, journalists, and social scientists of the immediate postwar era, such as [...]
Russell Kirk If it sounds like an Indiana Jones movie recast with the Sage of Mecosta, you’re not so wrong. It’s a real mystery involving real medieval Crusaders; it’s full of action and adventure, it co-stars the Father of Modern American Conservativism and it may help to explain the Bohemian Tory’s famous wanderlust, [...]
Tonight I shall commit the deliberate indiscretion of trying to say what may be, all in all, unsayable. Let me, therefore, begin with a little disquisition on ineffability. First, there often exists an insuperable inner resistance to speech. We may declare something to be unspeakably terrible, or unmentionably shameful, or, again, unutterably beautiful or inexpressibly [...]
George W. Carey1933-2013 We mourn the passing (Monday) of George W. Carey, Senior Contributor to The Imaginative Conservative, longtime professor at Georgetown, and respected scholar in the political theory of the early American Republic. He offered penetrating analysis and commentary on the evolution of separation of powers in America, the modern presidency, and foreign [...]
The White City, in its pride and presumption, lay under siege. Having gathered “his most cunning smiths and sorcerers,” Melko, the twisted one, had directed the creation of organic machines, through “iron and flame” to attack. Led by the leader of the demonic balrogs, Gothmog, and armed with such unholy weapons, Melko’s forces breached the [...]
I was out driving this morning, doing some errands. A car ahead of me was going about 30 in a 55 speed limit zone, and as usual I was annoyed. Going so slow, I was forced to look around. I saw businesses working, signs that told me where I was. A man who recently bought [...]
“This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.” These lines from T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” are often quoted, but seldom taken to heart. Even those of us who consider ourselves students of Eliot’s work on civilization’s decline tend to overdramatize what is really a quite tawdry cultural age. [...]