To rebuild their movement and society, and to rebuild a viable culture, conservatives must embrace the conservative populism championed by two men: filmmaker Frank Capra and scholar Willmoore Kendall. Pursuing this path will be challenging, for populism has become a bogeyman for the powers that be. Last December, my wife and I motored a couple [...]
Beauty has subjective elements, but there are certain objective principles that must be followed. Data centers are ugly because they do not deal with these fundamental elements. They introduce an appearance of brutality that leaves people overwhelmed and crushed. All across the country, data centers are popping up like mushrooms. Likewise, people everywhere are mobilizing [...]
The debt Wendell Berry described is owed by everyone who has inherited something – a faith, a family, a school, a country – from people who are now gone and who are now responsible for handing it, intact and loved, to people yet to be born. That is the whole of the cultural cycle Berry described. [...]
The American community that I, a Chinese national, discovered on Perrin Avenue in Lafayette, Indiana, offers its members a supportive and loving world in which religious and cultural traditions are preserved and shared beliefs venerated. When Linda Schafer, a loyal reader of The Imaginative Conservative, sent me the first email in mid-March 2021 introducing herself [...]
Socialism always and everywhere decays into outright abuse of the human person. Has there ever been a socialism that didn’t result in the establishment of a gulag, a holocaust camp, or a killing field? At age 58, I can state with utter earnestness that one of the most devastating things of our present age is [...]
Today in America, people of faith are binding up the unraveled fabric of civil society in tangible ways. We hold the threads individually, but when they are bound together, we can reweave a picture of order and beauty in human souls, woven in the vibrant colors of love. People of faith have given our culture [...]
The three vows of the Benedictine monk are obedience, stability, and conversion of life. In our own ways, we can follow this example, making it real by paying attention to prayer, cracking the books in solid study, and rolling up our sleeves in the honest, hard work of rebuilding what has fallen into despair and [...]
Our continued success as a country is dependent upon a recovery of our appreciation of liberty, the original division of power, and the renewal of personal responsibility for perpetuating the regime. As we celebrate American Independence, it is appropriate to reflect upon the foundations of our liberty that the American Founding—especially the Founders' Declaration of [...]
We have increasingly placed our faith in the power of government to provide solutions for human misery. What was once a strong level of responsibility and autonomy at the city, county, and state level has shifted toward a massive concentration at the federal level. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s, he marveled [...]
If young people do not have a conscious philosophy, the philosophy of relativism is the default. And if relativism is a noxious gas and our young people are the canaries, then it is only a matter of time until our whole society succumbs to the effects of those fumes. Walker Percy once wrote that novelists [...]
Our American forefathers and mothers arrived in a land with nothing and made it into the wealthiest, most powerful nation on the planet. I know how they did it because I’ve been to Kennett, Missouri. My grandparents were two of those who put their hands to the plow, broke up the fallow ground, suffered, and [...]
“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” —Hebrews 13:2 I am probably more likely to entertain strangers when on the road than I am at work or at home. While traveling on a plane, a train, or a bus, one of my favorite positions is the seat [...]
If the people who profess belief in God were to actually live with intentionality—in their business decisions, in their classrooms, in their television broadcasts and movie scripts, in their community organizations, and in their art—together we would transform the culture. One advantage I have in this conversation is that the Elliott household continues the discussion [...]
People in my hometown of Galveston, Texas don’t have a superb explanation or philosophy for their city. It’s just their home. It’s a beautiful place with a beautiful history. Statues still stand. The streets are largely clean; the police take care to contain crime to the smallest radius possible. That all is a clear contrast [...]