Ben Lockerd is Professor of English at Grand Valley State University, where he has received the Alumni Association’s Outstanding Educator Award. He is the author of The Sacred Marriage: Psychic Integration in “The Faerie Queene”and Aethereal Rumours: T. S. Eliot’s Physics and Poetics, as well as articles on Eliot and on Renaissance literature. He has served as president of the T. S. Eliot Society. Recently, he edited a collection of essays, T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition (2014).
I have noticed that my liberal friends have been very depressed lately. I used to think that my conservative pals and I were the ones who were constantly bemoaning the decline of Western civilization, but we just can’t...
After the shock of the 2016 election, liberals got a civics lesson on the electoral college established by the Constitution, and they didn’t like it. In his new book, Timothy Snyder speaks for them in bemoaning the fact that the founders created not a direct democracy but a republic...
The necessity of personal morality in a thriving community is denied by the enemies of the permanent things, who do not believe that there are permanent standards of behavior or indeed an unchanging human nature, and who seek to create political systems that will make everyone happy...
While T.S. Eliot never made any comments critical of Charles Darwin or his theory of the evolution of species, he was quite critical of various popularized versions of Darwin’s theory that exaggerated its explanatory power and extrapolated...
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
—Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
These famous lines of Keats have charmed and delighted readers for two centuries, but skeptics...
(Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Benjamin Lockerd as he examines the importance of the moral imagination in learning the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.—W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher)
Everything is Political
Just as I began my college teaching career thirty years ago, the whole academy seemed to have accepted as axiomatic the assertion that “Everything is Political.” This self-evident universal truth...
A synod of Catholic bishops recently discussed ways of giving pastoral support to lay people as they struggle to live out the Church's perennial teachings regarding sexuality. Meanwhile, a new book has appeared on The Birth...
T. S. Eliot (Longman Critical Readers Series) edited and introduced by Harriet Davidson. )
The current dominance of postmodern literary theory in the Academy may be illustrated by an experience of...
I want to thank Winston Elliott and the The Imaginative Conservative for giving me this opportunity to expatiate on a topic that has been much on my mind for many years, but which I have never addressed directly. Let me...
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
(Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”)
These famous lines of Keats have charmed and delighted...
“Eliot’s reputation as a critic of society has been worse than his record”—so wrote Roger Kojecký at the beginning of his 1971 book, T. S. Eliot’s Social Criticism. Thirty-five years later, the situation...
More bad news from the Academy: literary study is being replaced by “literary theory.” This revolution has already occurred at some of the most prestigious institutions (including Harvard, Michigan State, et al.) and now arrives at...
