Though land and setting seem rarely featured in Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark, they do comprise an unusual role, one that grows towards the past instead of the future. Cather...
The imagination must be won back. This is Dr. Onalee McGraw’s aim, and she fights with the finest of the films made in our own nation, by Hollywood itself, and sometimes even by corrupt men and women...
“You...
Wine is the gift that lifts our gaze from a world of toil to a horizon of leisure and community. It is the gift that reminds us of our primordial communion with one another and with the divine, and the gift that commemorates the radical generosity of...
Though William Sidney Mount’s name is rarely mentioned except among art experts, the images he created are timeless Americana—skillfully rendered scenes full of homely comforts and the joy of life...
“How glorious it is to paint in the...
The imagination invests the world with that richness and resonance which makes it an attractive dwelling for the intellect. But the imagination is indispensable to action as well. For the real world is worth our exertion only when the visionary imagination sets the scene for action...
That Western culture is in an advanced state of decay is, I would guess, an article of faith for many readers of The Imaginative Conservative. But consciousness of this decay goes back further than many people are...
Editor's Note: Gustav Holst wrote his "Ode to Death" in 1918-1919 in the wake of World War I. Though he received a medical exemption from military service, Holst had composer-friends who served (Ralph Vaughan Williams) and died (George Butterworth) in the horrific combat on the Western Front. The...
So incisive and troubling did the Nazis find Jean Renoir’s indictment of war and his embrace of the shared culture of Europe, that when the Wehrmacht invaded France and occupied Paris in the spring of 1940, Renoir's film La Grande Illusion was among the first cultural artifacts Nazi officials confiscated...
It is time to whisper the truth that dare not speak its name. In short, it’s time to face the real facts about Oscar Wilde and his real views on homosexuality...
It was with a queer...
Last week a student asked me, “What is creativity?” I was unsure how to respond. I felt like the speaker from Leaves of Grass musing about a child, who, fetching a handful of grass, asks him what the...
We must come to grips with the actual expansiveness of the West and consider candidly its possible superiority—superiority, that is, in the scope it gives to individual human nature by the universality of its conceptions...
I shall begin with...
Whereas heroic missionary effort and martyrdom seemed the hallmark of the first Jesuits, the second generation moved in a different direction...
In the Roman calendar, October is a harvest for militant saints. Kicking off with Saint Therese of Lisieux...
In the late 1960s, revolutionary protests were directed at the conduct of the war in Vietnam and in advocacy of a "Civil Rights" movement. Leftist activists, assessing how best to capitalize on this unrest, concluded that revolution in...
It’s Halloween, and you’re looking for that perfect, spooky Halloween music that’s a little more sophisticated than “The Monster Mash” and “Thriller” and “Werewolves of London.” Look no further, friends. I’ve done my own hopping around...
