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 [...]
A profound Christian influence in small things still lingers despite these brutal and atheistic times. Those who defend tradition must fight tooth and nail to defend what is still Christian in the present culture, wherever it is found—even in fonts. As the Culture War rages, no field is exempt from its reach. Much has been [...]
The Ancient Serpent had oft-times crawled into the sacred precincts of Holy Church since his first entry. However, this time his havoc would strike a thousand blows to the Mystical Body of Christ. St. Pope Pius X named the serpent: Modernism. At the beginning of time a snake slithered into a Garden called Eden. He entered [...]
Everyone has an explanation for the turn of events in November. It’s the economy, the culture, a failure to connect with working-class Americans. All these are valid reasons. However, I have my own explanation that sheds some light on what has gone wrong in America. It explains something of the craziness of our times. I [...]
Like it or not, Grace exists despite Oren Cass’s inability to sense it. Now is the time to appeal to God to send His Grace to this age of little faith. Such a move is the only one that makes sense in the face of the postmodern decadence that now prevails. A disturbing new trend [...]
Both John Paul II and T.S. Eliot give people something to hope for: St. John Paul speaks of a new springtime on the horizon signaling the emergence of a culture of life, and Eliot ends “The Waste Land” on a hopeful, if cryptic, note. We are all familiar with Saint John Paul II’s description of [...]
The West is split by a new cosmology or religion, pitting a faith in Divine Retribution against a founding faith in Divine Redemption, those who trust a Providential Creation versus those who evangelize a Universal Catastrophe. We’re now embroiled in a culture war, yet the insurgents’ purpose and origin remain obscure. A random collection of [...]
In “The City of God,” Augustine systematically lays bare the empty ideology of the city of man and the Roman empire in a breathtaking counter-narrative that remains remarkably modern and relevant for today. In contrast to the city of man, the City of Love, Augustine argues, is the godly city to which Christians belong and [...]
According to David French, when Christians and drag queens agree to coexist peacefully, both are “protecting the First Amendment from the culture war.” God and the devil can peacefully waltz together. But God and Satan are eternal and unequal enemies. One rules over His creation—including heaven, earth, humanity, and the universe. The other—the eternal loser—reigns [...]
Centering our national politics on the culture wars is unhelpful because in the end it simply is not cut out for this. The optimal jurisdictional sphere for resolving many of our cultural battles will be localities, not states. Localities must be empowered boldly to operate and experiment within the immense gray areas that the questions [...]
It is fitting that one of the most profound thinkers of the 20th century should also have been one of its most obscure. Nicolás Gómez Dávila's critique of democracy may go some way in explaining why he remains a relatively unknown figure in the English-speaking world, for we in the modern West are all children [...]
If I had to speculate about why more young men are succumbing to nihilism in the culture at large, I would guess that our curriculum has something to say about it. Perhaps young men feel dishonored when the prevailing feminist ideologies that they encounter in their classes at most universities belittle their masculinity instead of [...]
George Herbert and Nicholas Ferrar illustrate the way forward for Christians in troubled times. They followed the “Benedict Option,” if you like. While their own church and country was torn apart by decades of religious strife, immorality, violence, greed and corruption, they simply got on with living an authentic Christian life. On our recent pilgrimage [...]
The innocent child instinctively and implicitly knows what is good or bad, beautiful or ugly. Like the innocent child denouncing the emperor’s “new clothes,” he recognizes the drag queen as ugly and sinister as a wicked witch in a fairy tale. The child does not bend to the politically- correct opinions and says what he [...]