Despite America’s flawed past, despite the fact that previous generations honored some questionable individuals, our history did not unfold solely within the grid of racism. New England pioneers possessed high ideals of justly ordered freedom, and they carried those ideals west, and in “The Pioneers,” David McCullough is on nothing less than a civilizational [...]
Heaven knows why, but on Easter Sunday 2020 I thought back to a conversation I had with Christopher Hitchens. I’d invited him to come to the Hauenstein Center to talk about his recent book on Thomas Jefferson. It was October 3, 2006. On the two-hour drive from Detroit Metro Airport to Grand Rapids, he [...]
In a crisis, it is best to balance change and continuity. The liberal arts help us do so by embracing both. On the one hand, they are the anchor-in-bedrock that conserves the best of our culture. On the other hand, they are the wind-in-the-sail that powers us to betterment. I. Accelerating Our Experience of [...]
From the founding generation to the greatest generation, Americans sought meaning in one or more of the three operating systems that informed Western civilization: Judeo-Christianity, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism. The productive tension among those three operating systems defined the modern age. Three radically different world views—yet we moderns kept them suspended in a three-way polarity. [...]
As we are forced into isolation and confronted by our mortality in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we begin to ask ourselves an important question: What does it mean to be human? Gleaves Whitney, Director of Grand Valley State University’s Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies, and Winston Elliott III, The Imaginative Conservative’s Publisher and [...]
In our age of clickbait and hyperbole, people call things “unprecedented” that are not unprecedented at all. Public officials shamelessly brag that the nation’s recent economic growth is unequaled. (It’s not.) Broadcasters breathlessly report that today’s anxiety over the stock market is unheard of. (Actually the number of suicides after the Crash of 1929 [...]
Who’s right, the public health officials or the economists? That’s the question we are tempted to ask. But in this pandemic, it’s the wrong question. Both sides are right. Franklin D. Roosevelt had his Great Depression. George W. Bush had his Great Recession. And Donald J. Trump has his Great Pandemic. Over the past weeks, [...]
As coronavirus fatalities multiply these days—as COVID-19 leaves our bodies sick and makes our spirits sick at heart—I find myself asking how similar the mood today is to that of the West during the 1889-1890 flu pandemic. One of the world’s worst plagues occurred in 1889-1890. The so-called Russian flu is of particular interest [...]
A free government is only sustainable if citizens can govern themselves. Socrates patiently revealed, through conversations that held a mirror up to fellow citizens, that they did not sufficiently understand such basic concepts as justice, piety, virtue, truth, and goodness when applied to themselves. Yet they presumed to govern others? Today’s offering in our [...]
Given that human beings’ aspirations are framed by limitations, there will always be a dynamic tension between God and man, faith and reason, the absolute and relative, the universal and the particular, unity and diversity, Jerusalem and Athens, liberty and order. Though the work is never finished, historian Stephen J. Tonsor III entered into [...]
The Christian humanist understands this: that human beings are not Homo sapiens, not wise; but they are Homo in medio, “in the middle of things.” Thus, it falls to us to mediate between the many polarities that define our existence. The Christian humanist ponders these polarities as already set out in the creation story. In [...]
If conservatives can pin down the idea of decadence while avoiding shrill tones, they may go far in explaining what it means for a civilization to decline… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Gleaves Whitney as he explores how conservative critics may articulate the standard by which [...]
All Americans tend to look at the nation either as disciples of Jefferson or as disciples of Adams: Jefferson told Americans what they wanted to hear; Adams told Americans what they needed to know… I. I was having a beer with a couple of other graduate students. We were looking out onto State Street, [...]
The liberal conservative must be discerning. For he believes in freedom as well as in order. He believes in individualism as well as in community. He believes in the equality of all men as well as in hierarchy, natural aristocracy, and excellence… After the trip to Washington, DC, where I thrilled at seeing the [...]