I have been asked to speak just a bit about my position as the second holder of the titles Scholar in Residence and Visiting Scholar of Conservative Thought and Policy. Two weeks ago, my college roommate and still one of my closest friends, asked me what it felt like to be entering a place with CONSERVATIVE [...]
Poor John Adams. He will almost always stand in the shadows of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. He will always be remembered first and foremost as a dumpy bulldog, a failed president, and the husband of Abigail Adams. And yet… and yet… there was a true and uncommon genius about the man. David McCulloch did [...]
The teaching and inculcating of virtue—rooted in and derived from the Judeo-Christian understanding of the Natural Law—should be the purpose of a liberal arts education. Virtue remains a difficult concept for the modern mind to grasp, as the American radicals of the 1960s and 1970s viewed it as elitist and oppressive, and the radical leaders [...]
Ultimately, the Church—as the only historical entity that transcends nationalisms and ideologies—must use its intellectual strength to combat, attenuate, or destroy that which was loosed from the abyss. “It is, therefore, the duty of those elements in Western Society that still possess a principle of spiritual unity to rally the divided forces of our civilization,” [...]
Pearl Street, Boulder, CO The beauty of Colorado’s Front Range continues to overwhelm me. I do not think it is a mere temporary giddiness as the Birzer family adjusts to its new home. Everything feels not only comfortable culturally for this writer raised in neighboring Kansas, but every varied environment as the Great [...]
On October 12, 1889, Mary Louisa and Henry Philip Dawson gave birth to a son, Henry Christopher. Descended from a long line of Celtic aristocracy, Mr. Dawson was born in a Welsh castle, an immense structure believed in myth to have been built all in a single night. His mother’s family had great standing in [...]
Almost exactly a year ago, I came out of the closet. I admitted it to the world and without reservations. I was and remain a Batman devotee. Much to my surprise, a lot of The Imaginative Conservative’s readers are also rather fond of Batman. So, in my weirdness (at least in this particular one), I am [...]
A year ago, while on a panel with that extraordinary radio personality, Mike Church, and a few folks from another website, I think I caused a bit of a stir by arguing that a real man’s existence was about protecting one’s family from the world, conserving what little order could be found in the family [...]
The New York Times Review of Books once placed J.R.R. Tolkien’s collective writings and stories about Middle-earth on its list of the twenty greatest literary works of the twentieth century. The ability of Tolkien to create an alternative society with a fully developed system of morals and beliefs was cited as the main reason for this [...]
And, so it begins. The Hillsdale offices of The Imaginative Conservative have officially closed. Dr. Miles Smith IV will, happily, reside in what housed them for the next twelve months in southern Michigan. Just as true, the Longmont offices of The Imaginative Conservative are now open for business. Of course, HQ remains in Houston. But, [...]
It is hard not to laugh when my students think they are imitating or comprehending the zeitgeist of—whether to honor or mock—the 1980s. Though, in almost every way, it is impossible to fault them for this. The individual members of the incoming freshman class will have entered this world sometime in 1996 or 1997, a [...]
As young children, my older brother and I watched the original Star Trek series on Saturday mornings. We were not big TV watchers as a family, but Star Trek was special. To make it even better, it was the local PBS that aired Star Trek, presenting it free of all commercials. Every Saturday, Todd and [...]
To put it simply (and perhaps a bit “simplistically”—but I prefer to think of it as putting it “with fervor”), Christopher Dawson was one of the greatest historians of the twentieth century, certainly one of its greatest men of letters, and perhaps one of the most respected Catholic scholars in the English-speaking world. I’ve have [...]
A quiet but tenacious scholar and gentleman, Oxford’s Stratford Caldecott has spent his life as an editor and writer, a promoter of everything and every and any one who seeks in this rather fallen world to discover the eternal good, the true, and the beautiful. For decades, through his own writings, through his excellent journal, [...]