True unity among men must have its roots in that common participation in the holy tradition reaching back to an utterance of God Himself. One wonders whether tradition is not actually anti-historical. It stands in stark contrast to the most impressive and most visible strand of the historical process, namely, the ever-advancing scientific investigation of [...]
Like Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, conservatives must come up from politics and recognize that the roots of a truer just order are watered with the permanent ideals of truth, goodness, and beauty. The insights of the arts of life are vital to make life worth living. Readers of The Imaginative Conservative know well the phrase “beauty [...]
The characters in Mozart’s “Figaro” are the furthest thing from mere archetypes. Instead, they are as real and as identifiable as the people around us today, for Mozart was interested in human nature itself, and not the ephemeral and artificial distinctions of class. “In my opinion, each number in Figaro is a miracle,” composer Johannes [...]
In valor, there is hope—namely, the hope that our virtue may be fully complete. It is as men of valor that we will be all we can be. In valor, there is hope. —Tacitus When it played in the movie theaters, the terrific movie Act of Valor (2012) earned notoriety for two reasons. First [...]
Mahler’s Second Symphony was an attempt to confront the shock of mortality, to bring both composer and audience face to face with their own triviality and inconsequence. At the same time, the fearful image of the cavernous void presented Mahler with an opportunity, not to find, but to create meaning amid an otherwise purposeless existence. [...]
The civilization birthed by Israel, Greece, and Rome is the source of culture and individual traditions that can nourish us—traditions that can give us purpose, order, and beauty and rescue us from despair, boredom, and banality. Follow it and live by it, even if others scorn and abandon it. After all, it made us who [...]
According to Friedrich-Georg Jünger, modern man’s veneration of technology reveals his distant kinship to the Titans of myth. This ‘titanic’ impulse to dominate and consume expresses itself through our technology-driven industrial economy, which now determines every aspect of life from the air we breathe to the food we eat. Ongoing debates concerning the growing power [...]
Can we imagine that a good and loving God would allow the presence, in a world degraded due to human sin, of other rational beings who would have suffered, although innocent, its consequences? Formulated around 1950, the paradox bearing the name of Enrico Fermi was sparked by a rhetorical question: why haven’t we encountered intelligent [...]
We have no way of knowing whether the twenty-first-century collapse is yet another momentary stumble or finally the Dark Age. Like good Carolingians, however, we keep looking backwards for our recovery, trying to rebuild what we once had. Christopher Dawson’s prophetic The Making of Europe (1932) ends where the Gentle Reader might expect such a book to [...]
In making a case for the property rights of the American clergy, Bishop John Carroll made a revolutionary case for the nature of the American Church’s relationship with Rome. In these United States our Religious system has undergone a revolution, if possible, more extraordinary than our political one. —John Carroll, 1783 John Carroll and his fellow [...]
One of the more remarkable trends in the past five years in Catholic education is the noticeable increase of schools embracing a “classical education.” Ten or twenty years ago, the Catholic classical school was a start-up by disgruntled laity. Now one can find here and there whole diocesan school systems that have embraced the classical [...]
The extreme improbability of the “very perfectly precise” conditions needed for a sustainable universe capable of sustaining life within it was calculated by Oxford mathematician-physicist Roger Penrose in 1989. The number that Penrose calculated with respect to the conditions necessary for sustaining life is astronomical. At the beginning of his book, Science at the Doorstep [...]
The very fact that American Catholics chose a bishop in 1789 was an indication of a new-found boldness in the wake of the nation’s independence. Prior to the Revolution, followers of the Roman faith had realized that it was a risky proposition to establish an episcopate in a country dominated by Protestants. In these United [...]
Love must not be, but take a body too Air and Angels —John Donne The primal metaphor has been transposed as sleep an affiance with death eludes for death defective is but sleep. Alludes to resurrection now: a dawning rosed […]