There was a fascinating piece about Ben Nelson’s attempt to create a new “elite” university this weekend at the Wall Street Journal. His goal, he claims, is to make his own “Minerva University” a better Harvard. As my wife read the article to me (we’re traveling West, an annual All-Birzer family extravaganza—my very first pieces for [...]
I’m a Batman snob. There, I’ve admitted it. And, I’ve been a Batman snob since I was a kid in the mid 1970s when I first became aware of the mythic superhero. And, though I don’t collect comics anymore (too time consuming and too money consuming), I have a fairly good collection of Batman, Green [...]
At the beginning of his 1956 book, Beyond the Dreams of Avarice, Dr. Kirk wrote: I hope that beyond our dreams of avarice there may lie not merely an Age of Gluttony, but a time of repentance and reform, devoted to restoring the dignity of man. I hope that some of us may continue, with [...]
[The following are responses by Brad Birzer, Robert Woods, Lou Markos and Andrew Seeley to a New York Times op-ed by David Brooks. Mr. Brooks offered a heartfelt quasi-eulogy for the liberal arts. The original essay may be found here.] Brad Birzer For those of us who have been blessed to be a [...]
Hot Dogs, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Blowin’ Stuff Up July 4th the Birzers acted like typical Americans. We ate hot dogs, fresh fruit, and freedom fries. We read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s take on the Declaration of Independence. And, we blew lots and lots of stuff up. Throughout the day, an unease plagued me, though I [...]
The Imaginative Conservative Senior Contributors: Cyber Inklings W. Winston Elliott III, founder and grandmaster of The Imaginative Conservative, recently posted a collage of all of the Senior Contributors to The Imaginative Conservative. It’s quite a picture, and it’s more than a bit humbling as well as inspiring. As I was looking at it, [...]
The White City, in its pride and presumption, lay under siege. Having gathered “his most cunning smiths and sorcerers,” Melko, the twisted one, had directed the creation of organic machines, through “iron and flame” to attack. Led by the leader of the demonic balrogs, Gothmog, and armed with such unholy weapons, Melko’s forces breached the [...]
Christopher Dawson Continuing the theme of language and its importance to the human person, both individually and relationally (see previous essay), let us turn now to Christopher Dawson. The English historian Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), another patron of The Imaginative Conservative, embraced a solidly Aristotelian view of the social world. Aristotle had famously written [...]
In one of the finest books dealing with T.S. Eliot, The Art of Eliot (1949), Helen Gardner attempted to explain the poet’s employment of the language of his day. “Our age, with its undigested technical vocabulary, its misuse of metaphor, and its servitude to cliche, cannot be regarded as propitious for a poet. It is part of [...]
Christopher Dawson unceasingly promoted an examination of culture as the most important basis of understanding a society, the family, and the human person. He believed the desire to give primacy to politics led to a loss of imagination in the human person and an impoverishment of higher reasoning in human societies. Although largely ignored in [...]
J.R.R. Tolkien John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973) shaped my life in more ways than I can or ever will understand. At least in this life time. Though he died when I was only five years old, I have often given God thanks for allowing me to live on the same earth as Tolkien. Indeed, [...]
Figureheads Coming and Going For any of us interested in the history of post-war American conservatism (and, I assume you must be, or you wouldn’t be reading The Imaginative Conservative), we owe an immense debt to several historical figures and personalities—most immediately to Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville, but also to Cicero, St. Augustine [...]
Where are the Heroes? Where in this modern and post-modern world do we find an embrace of heroism and the heroic virtues? Certainly not in most literature published since the 1960s. There exists much irony and tragedy, certainly—remnants, perhaps, of late Greece as well as late Rome. But, in present-day serious literature, there exists almost [...]
“In every age, society has been relieved only by the endeavors of a few people moved by the grace of God.”—Russell Kirk, Roots Of American Order (1974) As I approach my fifteenth year teaching history at Hillsdale, and my seventeenth (or so) year of teaching at the college level over all, I find myself more [...]