Probably few who passed my grandmother on the street would have thought of her as a “great woman.” Yet I would beg to differ. Not that anyone is passing her now. At least if they are, they are more than unaware of it. She passed away from this world into the next more than eleven [...]
It seems that there is trouble in the liberal land of rainbows and butterflies, at least if you are a Democrat. What to do for poor President Barack Obama and what has become mandatory for every former president since Herbert Hoover: the establishment of a working, viable, and monstrous presidential library. It is nearly impossible [...]
As we approach Christmas and as The Imaginative Conservative continues to perform the excellent service of suggesting gifts for the grand holiday, I had the chance to talk to one of the most successful and imaginative conservatives in the country, Kevin McCormick. A professional musician, classical guitarist, award-winning poet and composer, father of four daughters, [...]
One of the reasons Russell Kirk traveled so much had to do with the very fact that he considered himself more than an American. He was a cultivator of a Republic of Letters, and that Republic transcended ethnic, political, racial, national, cultural, religious, and temporal prejudices. Piety Hill was not his world; it was the [...]
Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House remains one of the most sobering novels I have encountered in my life. The protagonist, Godfrey St. Peter, a native Kansan who has spent his career teaching history and culture at a small college on the Great Lakes, has more than a few similarities to your present author (me!). On [...]
For seventy-five years, Batman has played a significant role in the American mind and in American culture. He is, for all intents and purposes, an American original, equivalent to Natty Bumppo and Huck Finn. He even possesses many of the same qualities of each of these nineteenth-century literary figures. As Bruce Wayne, he is the [...]
Artist and writer Frank Miller serves as perhaps the best example of what modern popular culture has to offer. This is not faint praise, as popular culture has offered much in the way of mythology and symbolism. Of all the great pop artists of the last half century, Mr. Miller might very well be the best, [...]
In the summer of 1998, while on my ten-day honeymoon in Idaho, I found a tattered red paperback book in a used bookstore. Amazingly enough, Idaho had a lot of bookstores then, and I remember perusing many of them during our ten days of post-wedding bliss. Whether Idahoans still possess a bibliophilic outlook on life, [...]
I am guessing I am not alone in being tired of politics and, especially, politicians this election cycle. Often, perhaps more often than not, I am tired of politics. It is just so gritty and manipulative, so low and utilitarian. Give me just one Socrates for every thousand politicians. Though I am not proud of [...]
Irving Babbitt embraced the inherent Stoic qualities not only of the ancient Western world but also of high, ancient Asian culture as well. One of Western Civilization’s greatest defenders in the twentieth century, Harvard University’s Irving Babbitt, founder of the New Humanism, best friend to Paul Elmer More, and the teacher of T.S. Eliot, considered [...]
In the late 1920s, a very young Tom Burns and an only slightly older Christopher Dawson founded one of the most interesting journals of the decade, Order. Though it lasted only four issues, it was the standard bearer of a serious, if somewhat youthful and angry, Christian Humanism. Order, it proclaimed, was the highest need, [...]
Virgil should be considered as vital as any classical figure to the American Founders, who were truly Men of the West. The American Founders were Men of the West. For all intents and purposes, they might as well have been the remnants of Numenor, each capable of wielding Anduril. As such, they would not readily [...]
Throw together an English Roman Catholic terrorist from 1605, a 1930s noir atmosphere, a damsel who is only somewhat in distress, a government that makes Ingsoc look humane, some psychedelics, some fortuitous but random evangelical proof texting of The Collected Works of William Shakespeare, some references to the mass killings of the twentieth century, a [...]
“This is the end. Beautiful friend. This is the end. My only friend, the end.”—Jim Morrison, 1967 It’s hard to turn around this year without encountering someone talking or writing about the Apocalypse. This isn’t new, of course. Folks have been talking about and worrying about the Apocalypse since the Incarnation of Love walked on [...]