The spiritual life is going to be a life of mystery. Why would you not be humble in the face of that mystery? Why would you assume that the answers can be handed down to you, A to Z, no room for doubt? That’s child-like, that desire for answers. Adult life is dealing with an enormous amount of questions that don’t have any answers. So I let the mystery settle into my music. I don’t deny anything. I don’t advocate anything. I just live with it. We live in a tragic world, but there’s grace all around you. That’s tangible. So you try to attend to the grace.
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We hope you will join us in The Imaginative Conservative community. The Imaginative Conservative is an on-line journal for those who seek the True, the Good and the Beautiful. We address culture, liberal learning, politics, political economy, literature, the arts and the American Republic in the tradition of Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, Edmund Burke, Irving Babbitt, Wilhelm Roepke, Robert Nisbet, Richard Weaver, M.E. Bradford, Eric Voegelin, Christopher Dawson, Paul Elmer More and other leaders of Imaginative Conservatism. Some conservatives may look at the state of Western culture and the American Republic and see a huge dark cloud which seems ready to unleash a storm that may well wash away what we most treasure of our inherited ways. Others focus on the silver lining which may be found in the next generation of traditional conservatives who have been inspired by Dr. Kirk and his like. We hope that The Imaginative Conservative answers T.S. Eliot’s call to “redeem the time, redeem the dream.” The Imaginative Conservative offers to our families, our communities, and the Republic, a conservatism of hope, grace, charity, gratitude and prayer.
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History reveals long suffering has its rewards. Conscience is the dividing line. To deny evil, to include evil into the category of good, not to deny anything, is to advocate, to advocate an unwillingness to to stand among the good, among those who risk rejection for taking a stand. The more public the person, the greater the risk. Dear Bruce, love the sounds, words can be problimatical. Don’t you just love the lyrics,”…if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything?”
I agree with Bruce. It is not too difficult to feel some of the pain that motivates his poetry. I think everyone, in this place and time, needs to gain some understanding of how little, we actually understand of not only ourselves, but the physical world, As a chemical engineer, I make that distinction for a reason, I am constantly reminded that we do not understand, we make do. The technology that enthralls people is all merely an approximation. I often think of Elton John singing Rocket Man, all that technology, and he is resigned “its just my job five days a week”. To accept this ignorance, accept the bad with the good, that is all we can do. “Nothing Lucilius, is ours, except time. (Seneca)