While my memories might verge on the edge of fuzzy nostalgia from time to time, I remember quite clearly what the women and men of the 1970s did, said, and believed in small-town American neighborhoods. In those years, I absolutely loved reading (and researching and writing), but I also loved running, biking, and exploring. I [...]
When Human Events asked Russell Kirk to define “conservatism” only months into Ronald Reagan’s first presidential term, the grandfather of American conservatism paused, pensively, and answered only with some reluctance. I hesitate to call it a movement because it has never been asserted. There is no national conservative party. There are many conservative organizations but [...]
I have few regrets in my life. At least major ones. Of course, there are always things I could have done differently. And, though some of my life has been pretty rocky, especially childhood, I have had it pretty good. I have a great family, I have a solid and fulfilling career, and I get [...]
While anyone who knows anything about C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, or Owen Barfield knows of the existence of the Inklings, the group remains nearly impossible to define. Even the members of the group could not identify exactly what it was or what it meant. By the mid 1940s, Lewis defined it as a [...]
One of the most interesting developments of the post-Bush years has been the resurgence of the popularity of the term “progressivism.” With that popularity has come, of course, a resurgence of the ideas traditionally associated with progressivism, though highly sanitized. Some very good and well-intentioned scholars and commentators—who in general are NOT aligned with the [...]
Over the past year, good Americans have been fighting the changes that the Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. History standardized tests have made and are in the process of making. Most fights have been highly localized, generally at the county level. While some of these conflicts have made national news, most have stayed isolated and reported [...]
I consider myself a rather devout humanist. And, for better or worse, I do mean “devout.” Depending on my mood, I would argue that I am as taken with and as loyal to humanism as I am with my Christianity. Though I would never compare myself to St. Augustine, I certainly understand his detour from [...]
This weekend, I completed The Silmarillion. Not my first time. In fact, I have read The Silmarillion so many times since the fall of 1977, I have no idea what number of reading I’m actually on. Eight times? Nine? Ten? It was the first J.R.R. Tolkien I had ever encountered, even before The Hobbit or [...]
The twentieth century witnessed an assault on a number of once fine words, often hollowing out the traditional meanings and filling them with sheer refuse. Myth, in the twentieth century, became lie. Love became lust. Another such word, lost in the confusion of our present whirligig of post-modern life, is humanism. To even those who [...]
Neil Peart, Far and Near: On Days Like These (Toronto: ECW Press, 2014) One of our greatest living essayists in the English language, Canadian Neil Peart moves relentlessly through his life, breathing the rarefied air of excellence well- chased, and across varied cultural and natural landscapes, anywhere and everywhere to be discovered or rediscovered. An [...]
Tolkien and the Silmarillion, by Clyde S. Kilby (Harold Shaw, 1976) Unless you’re familiar with the excellent Wade Center, the chances are good you’ve never heard of Clyde S. Kilby (1902-1986), a professor of English at Wheaton College from 1935 until his retirement in 1981. Yet, every reader of The Imaginative Conservative should know this man [...]
The Fall of Arthur, by J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. by Christopher Tolkien (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2013). For those of us who have had a life-long passion for and of all things Tolkien, his unpublished poem “The Fall of Arthur” has always been a loving mystery for us. What could it be? How epic? Does [...]
When Christopher Dawson passed away in the late spring of 1970, he did so not only as one of the most important Catholic thinkers of his century, but he also did so as a loyal citizen of the City of God, having always resisted the myriad of temptations of this City of Man. As noted [...]
To suggest that Christopher Dawson was one of the greatest Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century is a rather easy thing both to affirm and confirm. His influence on T.S. Eliot, Etienne Gilson, Russell Kirk, David Jones, Eric Gill, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Thomas Merton, Sister Madeleva Wolff, Jacques Maritain, Bernard Wall, Tom Burns, Frank and [...]