Whether they be fairies, gnomes, cryptids, aliens, or elves, what are these creatures about which man has written for centuries? C.S. Lewis explained that the medieval mind understood them to be inhabitants of a kind of middle realm between the physical and the spiritual regions. But is this "Middle Earth" real? No matter our chosen [...]
The future will belong to the literate, not the un-literate, and the decline of reading will invariably be corrected by those at the forefront of the educational revolution sweeping America—and that is the rise of classical education. Some years ago I was discussing with a Benedictine abbot the trends he was experiencing among postulants and [...]
Jimmy Carter was a nice, good man who epitomized American Christianity’s reduction to Moralistic, Therapeutic Deism. As such, the singing of John Lennon's atheistic "Imagine"—Carter's favorite song—at the former president's funeral was entirely appropriate. Last week at former president Jimmy Carter’s funeral, country singers Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood sang ex-Beatle John Lennon’s song Imagine, [...]
What will delight lovers of J.R.R. Tolkien most is the portrait of the man that is drawn in the pages of Holly Ordway's biography. In the final chapters, she summarizes his life as the extraordinary fleshed out in ordinary. While Tolkien is completing his magnum opus, he is also maintaining the daily routine of husband, [...]
Could the Duhare of North America have been the descendants of Irish explorers who ventured across the Atlantic long before the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria set sail? Maybe it's the Amish in me, but there’s an ornery streak that delights in eccentric theories, provoking the establishment, undermining the accepted narrative, pondering alternative [...]
While one might respect the French traditions of haute couture and the artistic avant garde, who thought it was a good idea to mar the otherwise grand reopening of the historic Christian monument of Notre Dame by dressing the clergy in costumes so garishly outlandish? Once when I was living in England, I stood in [...]
Let us remember this day in Advent as a reminder of the true spirit of Saint Nicholas—a valiant defender of the faith, a tender-hearted lover of the poor and a kindly, generous soul, who saw that the true message of Christ’s nativity was that unless you become like a little child, you cannot enter the [...]
When your bird reaches the table this Thursday, you can ask your table mates if they know why the bird is called a turkey, and then—if you have read this essay—impress them with your encyclopedic knowledge. You remember the Dad joke at this time of year: “We’re having an international Thanksgiving. Mom’s serving Turkey on [...]
The triumph of Donald Trump was simply the triumph of the majority of Americans who saw their society slipping into anarchy and chaos without borders. I hope that in the next Trump years, the renewed, common-sense desire for proper borders in every area of life will prevail and will be balanced by that other great [...]
As another Halloween approaches, the memory leads me to ponder this annual festival of all that is ghoulish and ghostly. Is it all harmless fun or, in our increasingly secular age, are we in danger of dabbling with dark forces beyond our understanding? In the early 1980s when I was a young Anglican priest I [...]
The issue of women’s ordination is one comparatively minor aspect of the much larger issue of our times: the destruction and distortion of human sexuality and ultimately the destruction and distortion of the human race itself. The ordination of women in the Church of England was the catalyst for my conversion to the Catholic Church [...]
Popular culture is awash with the horror genre. Television shows, video games, movies and literature on the occult gush forth seeming to make the ironic point that the more our society becomes scientifically secular the more appetite there is for the supernatural. It seems impossible to avoid the tsunami of paranormal investigators, zombies, vampires and [...]
Rod Dreher wants us to see into the life of things—to see the creator hidden in the creation, to see the grandeur of God and sense the “deep down things.” But the trouble with the appeal of mysticism is the perennial danger of gnosticism. Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, [...]
Could the life of St Galgano be linked to the Arthurian legend of the Sword in the Stone? In an earlier essay for The Imaginative Conservative, I recounted my discovery of the famous “Sword of St Michael” while on a hitch-hiking pilgrimage from England to Jerusalem. For those who are unfamiliar, the Sword of St [...]