I am too old to want to spend the evening of my career trying to shore up a crumbling wall, when those who are in authority at the college are unwilling to listen to our pleas. No, I’d prefer to be in on building something exciting for the Church and for sheer ordinary humanity… Sometimes a [...]
The Augustan Age refers to a time period broadly revolving around the restoration of order (if not necessarily liberty) at the end of the Roman republic and the beginning of the empire—roughly 50BC to 120AD. Many scholars label it the “Silver Age of Roman Literature.” Every one of the authors listed below held numerous qualms [...]
In the first chapter of Understanding Media (1964), called “The Medium is the Message,” Marshall McLuhan begins the book by explaining his most famous aphorism. Over time, the proposition has acquired the status of a cliché, such that its original meaning and intent can become obscured. But as W. Terrence Gordon, the editor of the Critical [...]
Man, it is often said, cannot jump over his own shadow. The poet—and by “poet” I mean a writer of imaginative works in verse or prose—leaps over the universe. Sicut erat in principio et nunc et semper et in saecula saeculorum. I We not only read a novel, we enter into its created world. We [...]
There is a classic passage in Vergil’s Aeneid in which Anchises commends to future Romans what is, in effect, the “mission statement” for the Roman Empire. In these lines, the father of Aeneas is telling us what his son Aeneas, the Trojan who has journeyed from the fallen city of Troy, will set in motion [...]
Some Christians wonder if there is value in reading pagan classics like “The Aeneid.” I argue that we do well to interact with the stories that have shaped our world and to see how they glimpse, and miss, the truths of divine revelation. I recently re-read The Aeneid with some of my older sons as [...]
In the late 1920s, a very young Tom Burns and an only slightly older Christopher Dawson founded one of the most interesting journals of the decade, Order. Though it lasted only four issues, it was the standard bearer of a serious, if somewhat youthful and angry, Christian Humanism. Order, it proclaimed, was the highest need, [...]
Virgil should be considered as vital as any classical figure to the American Founders, who were truly Men of the West. The American Founders were Men of the West. For all intents and purposes, they might as well have been the remnants of Numenor, each capable of wielding Anduril. As such, they would not readily [...]
The purpose of cultural traditionalists ought to be to orchestrate a new renaissance for live classical music, to ensure that the dawn breaks on symphony halls that rise like polished temples in our midst rather than like ruins on abandoned hilltops. Sed me Parnasi deserta per ardua dulcis raptat amor. 1 —Virgil Perhaps our modern [...]
Last week, two of my Twitter friends (and friends of The Imaginative Conservative: @hencole and @Sir_Geechie) were happily discussing the 1965 Russell Kirk piece on Malcolm X; the one Winston graciously posted. After @henrole called it a birthday gift of sorts, @Sir_Geechie replied, “You know folks want narrative not knowledge.” I have found each of [...]
Even a frontier newspaper got right what our current commodifiers of “conservatism” don’t understand. In fact, not only do they not understand, they don’t even know they don’t understand. I’m not sure they know much of anything. Well, they know about getting people riled up and getting better ratings. I, of course, exclude the ever-excellent [...]
With stealth and no small amount of cowardice, the Greeks creep out of their strange gift, a large wooden horse, under the cover of night and safely within the locked city walls. Rather than face Aeneas and the Trojans as men in battle, the Greeks unlock the gates, letting their murderous comrades in, and proceed [...]
A favorite passage from Virgil’s AENEID, Book 8: The Shield of Aeneas But the goddess Venus Lustrous among the cloudbanks, bearing her gifts, Approached and when she spotted her son alone, Off in a glade’s recess by the frigid stream, She hailed him, suddenly there before him: ‘Look, Just forged to perfection by all my husband’s [...]