Chick-fil-A’s decision to stop donating to the Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes last month was met with a lot of anger on the part of conservatives and Christians because it was seen as a betrayal of a large portion of its customer base, many of whom were fans of the place for [...]
Greta Thunberg is the personification of all the eco-movement could want and more. As a child, she can lay claim to represent the future. She does not play the role of leader but assumes the much more important mantle of symbol. Time Magazine has announced that this year’s Person of the Year award will go [...]
With the loss of traditional religion as the guiding force of the Western world, following the collapse of the Medieval around 1350, politics quickly became not just a substitute, but a religion in and of itself, a proto-ideology serving as a glue for the emerging nation-states of Europe. Certainties that the Medievals had taken for [...]
Whenever The Imaginative Conservative asks me for Christmas gift recommendations, I think of P.G. Wodehouse. “The first rule in buying Christmas presents,” Wodehouse wrote, “is to select something shiny.” Why? “Because the wariest person will often mistake shininess for expensiveness.” […]
For many progressives, the issue is clear: Americans hold conflicting views about what it means to be American; something must change lest the nation be torn asunder; inaction can trigger a massive civil war. Of course, history is neither as deterministic nor as simplistic as the left makes it out to be. The influential left-leaning [...]
Puzzled by the sudden surge of identity politics, Mary Eberstadt traces its genesis to the sexual revolution. By doing so, she addresses the “primal screams” of faceless, lonely people grabbing at an identity like a shipwrecked person clutching at flotsam. Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics, by Mary Eberstadt (192 pages, Templeton [...]
He is thinking: “See how God writes straight on crooked lines.” —Machado de Assis What realistic form can a manifesto of Neo-Romanticism take in a positivistic age? How many people will even recognize it as such? In a time when life has been cheapened by the talons of radical ideology, those who cultivate a sense [...]
For this Christmas, I suggest you buy your Imaginative Conservative a sapling tree. That tree could be a blue spruce that might grow up to be, even more literally, a “Christmas tree” someday, but it can also be a shade tree or a tree that will produce nuts for wildlife or fruit for the family [...]
Traditionally, the type of men that women wanted to marry embodied all the classic standards of male achievement: educated, physically fit, able to hold down a job. But in 1960, everything changed. A watershed moment produced an oral contraceptive known as “the pill.” No innovation has fundamentally altered the premises of civilization quite like birth [...]
It strikes me that all those who talk incessantly of “my rights” are acting pridefully, in the sense that they are making themselves the centre of their own microcosmos at the expense of their neighbours. If we want freedom, however, we must be prepared to pay the price for it. One way of gauging the [...]
No matter how corrupt and bleak and depressing the world may appear, we can always turn to the many Cecilias of the world and see the goodness that is possible through grace and love. Properly remembered, these true symbols and true myths can re-orient our souls, our cultures, and perhaps even the world itself toward [...]
In response to the Trump presidency and alarming liberal trends, conservatives have been compelled to examine again the principles that unite them. In doing so, it would be worthwhile for them to look to G.K. Chesterton. The recent National Conservatism conference is one of many examples that conservatism is going through a significant re-evaluation process. [...]
Gaius and Tiberius Gracchus have long held the reputation of proto-Communists. However, it is time we re-examine this label and determine for ourselves the inadequacy of this nomenclature, and the false impression that it gives to men whose reputation has been sullied by false accusations of Revolution. Gaius and Tiberius Gracchus are known as the [...]
Rusty Reno’s recent book, Return of the Strong Gods is an excellent explanation of the roots of relativism. The short version is that two world wars left Western civilization with a huge societal case of post-traumatic stress disorder. With heads in hands, the thinkers concluded that we kill one another because of dogma. We say, [...]