In addressing the great issues of the existence of God, the meaning of life, and the fate of the soul, is it unreasonable to think that in his movie “Signs,” M. Night Shyamalan would pit as the enemy of man not far-fetched aliens, but very real demons? And there shall be signs in the sun, [...]
Viggo Mortensen as Franky In Sophocles’ great play, Antigone, the eponymous heroine defies Creon, the ruler of Thebes, by burying her brother, Polyneices, who fought against Creon in the city’s recent civil war. Creon has decreed that Polyneices’ treachery will be avenged by allowing his exposed body to be desecrated, “chewed up by birds and [...]
John Dalberg-Acton, the English, Catholic historian, and Robert E. Lee, the American, Episcopal warrior, shared much in common in terms of their views on liberty. It is interesting to note that Lord Acton corresponded with General Robert E. Lee after the conclusion of the American Civil War. Sympathetic to the Confederate cause, Lord Acton considered [...]
“I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you.” —Socrates, quoted by Plato, Apology “My work has always been about judging the distance between American reality and the American dream. There is a real patriotism underneath [...]
It is with sadness that we learned of the death yesterday of a great man, Stratford Caldecott, a Senior Contributor to The Imaginative Conservative. Stratford graced our pages with some sixty-six essays, on such wonderful and varied topics as: the nature of the human soul; the essence of beauty; the mythology of J.R.R. Tolkien; the philosophy of G.K. Chesterton; Prince Charles as [...]
The first thing one notices while strolling the beautiful grounds of St. John’s College is that there are no cell phones. At least, none are visible. Indeed, there are no tablets, no laptops, no electronics of any sort readily discernible. The absence of screens, faculty member Eva Brann proposes, precludes students from “dispersing themselves,” giving them [...]
Baseball is more than just a sport. Its designation as a “pastime” hints at its essential conservatism as an activity borne of a vanished agrarian civilization in which leisure was valued and in which time was to be filled with imaginative human creativity. The beginning of the baseball season is a natural time to reflect [...]
This is the story of one unique night on which rivals Wolfgang Mozart and Antonio Salieri truly went head-to-head, performing newly-composed, short operas back-to-back, at the request of Emperor Joseph himself. The rivalry between Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Mozart is well known, being the subject of Alexander Pushkin’s play, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera, and most famously [...]
The film “Savannah” wants us to see Ward Allen as a larger-than-life figure whose misanthropic lifestyle is grounded in a love of tradition and a resistance to modernity. But we are left to wonder whether its central character cloaks his innate contrarianism in high-minded principle for greater ends, or for his own purposes. Based on [...]
The 2013 film “The Lone Ranger” presents a challenge to the nationalist myth that undergirds the American identity. It is to be hoped that the film will compel Americans who see it to think more deeply about what drove the settlement of the West, as well as at what price and by what means Americans [...]
The present article is a reply to the recent piece in these pages by Timothy Gordon and Stephen Jonathan Rummelsburg, which in turn was a response to an article by Dr. Kevin Brady and me, again in The Imaginative Conservative. I speak here for myself, leaving my co-author to file his own reply if he [...]
Ronald Reagan was indeed a giant among men, a true Man of the West, and conservatives should rightly and proudly claim him as one of their own. “Very soon, all too soon, your government will need not just extraordinary men—but men with greatness,” Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn said during his visit to the U.S. Capitol [...]
As winter descends, allow me to recommend to you, dear reader, six pieces of classical music that will warm your soul, as you curl up by the fire with a good book and a hot toddy. […]
If original sin lies at the heart of Bruce Springsteen’s work, redemption lurks out there somewhere too. In 1989, the year before his death, the great Southern novelist Walker Percy wrote a letter to rock-and-roll legend Bruce Springsteen, which read, in part: This is a fan letter—of sorts. I’ve always been an admirer of yours, [...]