No creature in all of creation has it as difficult as do humans. Being flesh as well as spirit, humans share in the natures of both the animals and the angels. Unlike either, however, the human has true free will. We choose good and ill at every moment of our lives. Animals, merely creatures of [...]
“This is going to be a grim job for all of us, to put it mildly, but it’s… important. We owe those victims our best work, whether we rescue anyone alive or only recover remains.”— James Greer in Commander in Chief I am sure that I am not alone among The Imaginative Conservative community in [...]
In my previous essay, “Eric Voegelin: A Primer,” I had the privilege to offer a brief sketch of this German intellectual’s life and thought. In this essay, I would like to explore one of Voegelin’s three most important ideas: his critique of Gnosticism. As in the previous essay, I am drawing heavily upon the fine [...]
Seventeen years ago, I flew into Seattle. I do this a lot, but this was one of those flights. Not just any flight, but one of THOSE flights. The kind in which everything seems to go wrong. Delays, turbulence, more delays, and then a few more delays. By the time I got to my hotel in [...]
On my religious position, I have been classified as a Protestant, a Catholic, an anti-semitic, and as a typical Jew; politically, as a Liberal, a Fascist, a National Socialist, and a Conservative; and on my theoretical position, as a Platonist, a Neo-Augustinian, a Thomist, a disciple of Hegel, an existentialist, a historical relativist, and an [...]
Do you want to rule a world? Blow apart a sun? Test a theory of community? Explore the very depths of depravity? End slavery and misery? Destroy all empires? It is possible. . . At least in the imagination. The proper study of man is everything. The proper study of man as artist is everything [...]
Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” explores pretended and real madness, its plot twisting and turning in ways perhaps only logical to the perplexing soul of its director. As with all his best movies, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) brutally analyzes modernity, finding it schizophrenic and wanting. In contrast to the stripped-down minimalism of Rope, which also stars Jimmy Stewart, Vertigo is in every way [...]
In a critical moment in the plot of Stephen King’s It: A Novel, the protagonist finds himself distraught over a grade his creative writing teacher has given him for what he considered a first-rate story. The story comes back from the instructor with an F slashed into the title page. Two words are scrawled beneath, [...]
While very few modern conservatives—especially those who sell conservatism as a consumer product—even remember the movement’s founder, Russell Kirk, those who do remember him often do so by envisioning him as an antiquated relic, having passed from this world long after he had contributed much to it. At best, Kirk might well represent a pre-1960s [...]
Even J.R.R. Tolkien, interestingly enough, could not pinpoint exactly when the mythology began. One can most certainly date the mythology if only in its barest, least recognizable form sometime prior to his participation in the Great War, when the young man wrote his poem, “The Voyage of Eärendil the Evening Star.”[1] In a letter written [...]
Hoping to prove successful in combining a love of things old with mythology and with a desire to uphold the dignity of the human person in a world rent asunder by warring ideologies, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis challenged each other to create deep works of the imagination. After a “toss up,” the two men [...]
Ray Bradbury: The Last Interview and Other Conversations Sam Weller, ed., (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, December 2014) One of the hardest things I’ve had to assess in my professional life as a historian and a biographer is just how much to take seriously in a person’s life. I consider, pass, and render judgments on a moment-by-moment basis! [...]
Few things reveal the degraded state of “conservatism” in America more than the recent, seven-minute exchange between Bill O’Reilly and George Will. What the two fought about really matters very little. To set the context, suffice it to state the debate had to do with the attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life and how well Mr. [...]
Since the appearance of John Garth’s excellent Tolkien and the Great War in 2003, a number of scholars and writers have explored the role and influence of war on the fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and other members of the Inklings. In reviewing Mr. Garth’s book when it came out, I noted that the [...]