Jonathan Edwards helped to invent a new America, committed to a national covenant and an unprecedented spiritual egalitarianism. In 1930, the historian Henry Bamford Parkes critically assessed the legacy of America’s most famous Puritan intellectual, Jonathan Edwards. According to Parkes, “it is hardly a hyperbole to say that, if Edwards had never lived, there would [...]
Could the life of St Galgano be linked to the Arthurian legend of the Sword in the Stone? In an earlier essay for The Imaginative Conservative, I recounted my discovery of the famous “Sword of St Michael” while on a hitch-hiking pilgrimage from England to Jerusalem. For those who are unfamiliar, the Sword of St [...]
Harry Jaffa’s constitutional history of America’s late-eighteenth-century is not credible nor, in keeping with many of his own pronouncements, is it conservative. The writing of history, as we have learned from authors as diverse as Thucydides, Voltaire, Nietzsche, Butterfield, Collingwood, and Oakeshott can and has been done in strikingly different ways while serving radically different [...]
Bartolomé de Las Casas is an unsung hero who wanted to convert the pagan Native Americans to Christ as well as stop the sinful aspects of the European conquest of the New World. Ever since the advent of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s myth of the “noble savage” in the eighteenth century, there has been a tendency to idealize [...]
Despite the multitude of Christian denominations that have sprung up over the last 500 years, there seem to have been few, if any, important divisions among Christians about the authenticity of the canon of the New Testament since the Catholic Church promulgated it at the Council of Rome more than 1,600 years ago. I. The [...]
Cristina Neagu Cristina Neagu specializes in the literature and arts of the Renaissance. She has a doctorate from the University of Oxford. The fields in which most of her work has been conducted include Neo-Latin literature, rhetoric, art history and history of the book. From 2003 until 2023 she was Keeper of Special [...]
Pelagius of Asturias was a warrior of Christendom who is revered by the Catholics of Spain but is largely unknown to the wider world. One of the most enchanting places in the whole of Christendom is Covadonga in the Asturias region of northern Spain. The visitor, on approaching it for the first time, could easily imagine [...]
For Clyde Wilson, the Jeffersonian conservative tradition was never a stale embrace of the past for its own sake. It conserves only to produce something better. In 1969 the late Mel Bradford recommended to Modern Age’s second editor, Eugene Davidson, that he should publish a groundbreaking article by a young historian named Clyde Wilson. The [...]
The Enlightenment may well be the end of an old story rather than the beginning of a new one. The philosophy of insatiable appetites changed the Christian-Aristotelian moral order into the modern world, but now that the change is just about complete, what purpose does its catalyst serve? Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites From [...]
Americans turned to the concrete lessons of history and experience to guide them in securing their liberty. The French, on the other hand, deified Reason above not only experience, but also above religion and divine revelation. One of the many differences between the American and French Revolutions is that, unlike the French, Americans did not [...]
By the time of his death, Fr. Allan MacDonald was lauded throughout Scotland for his pioneering scholarship in the field of Celtic studies, for his tireless political campaigning to alleviate the plight of the poor, and for his poetry and translations. Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing, Onward! the sailors cry; Carry [...]
The Peloponnesian War is an example of how, if not properly managed, a small crisis can spiral out of control and eventually into a full-blown war. The Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) was actually the second war fought between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century. Why did hostilities break out into the open again? The [...]
The Great Tradition patiently endures, ready to speak on its own behalf, ready to challenge narrow prejudices, ready to examine those with the courage to be interrogated by it, ready to teach those who are willing to be made unfit for the modern world. The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What It Means to Be [...]
What do we make of the four “Almost Sacraments”? Among other things, we might note how they bear upon a common interest that is, sadly, more and more neglected in today’s Church: young men. How many sacraments are there anyway? Seven? Two? Two-and-a-half? If you are Roman Catholic today, your Church has handed down this [...]