Orestes Brownson believed that there must reside a sanction for justice and order which cannot be found apart from religious principles. Without such sanctions, we fight the same battles in political season after political season under the various ideologies intending to make America great again; but only the standards of those “permanent things” taught by [...]
Historical consciousness is to civilized society what memory is to individual identity. Without memory there are no workable rules of conduct, no standard of justice, no basis for restraining passions, no sense of the connection between an action and its consequences. A culture without memory will necessarily be barbarous. I am delighted to be with [...]
The truth is that for all its failings, America has provided more opportunity, security, and freedom to a group of people more diverse than any other nation in history. It is not because America is systemically rotten; but because it is foundationally good. Justice for all calls for those foundations to be defended, not destroyed. [...]
Pope Gregory XVI believed that, even if it were true that immediate spiritual advantages might be gained by revolt, or by the introduction of liberal measures, the shock to the monarchical system involved by such changes would be disastrous to the Church and Society. Revolution and Papacy: 1769–1846, by E. E. Y. Hales (Cluny Media, [...]
There was a time, a far healthier time, when the heroism of those who defended Malta from the Islamic onslaught was lauded by the whole Christian world. Jean Parisot de Valette All saints are heroes, but not all heroes are saints. There are some who have made great sacrifices for Christendom while not [...]
The Duke of Wellington was an exemplar of an older England—an England bound by blood, not interest. He affirmed the very English equality of manhood, which comes with honorable service in the line, the rule that he who is with the king on St. Crispin’s Day shall be by him called “brother.” The Great Duke, [...]
One of the most heinous crimes against humanity that modernity has perpetrated is its war on the humanities. And let’s not forget that the humanities are thus called because they teach us about our own humanity. A failure to appreciate the humanities must inevitably lead to the dehumanizing of culture and a disastrous loss of [...]
To what extent Colonel Edward House’s novel "Philip Dru" contributed to the Wilsonian transformation of the Democratic party will likely never be known. But we do know that Woodrow Wilson read the book, brought House to the White House, and relied on House for advice and companionship. Philip Dru: Administrator - A Story of Tomorrow, [...]
What is true of architecture, art, and music is equally true of literature. Throughout the history of Christendom, great literature has paid homage to sacred liturgy and the sacraments. Author's Note: On the evening of Wednesday, September 25 I was honoured to give the keynote address at the opening of the annual conference of the [...]
Christopher Columbus is without a doubt responsible for the Columbian Exchange—which through human agency recreated the lost world of Pangea. But was Columbus the first to discover America? The memory—and especially the statues—of Christopher Columbus have taken quite the beating over the last half-century. The great Lakota activist, Russell Means, once called him worse than [...]
In his lifetime, Edgar Allan Poe’s renown lay primarily in his reputation as the foremost critic of the day. As a critic, he complained that four or five cliques controlled American literature by controlling the larger portion of the critical journals. Edgar Allan Poe secured a permanent place among world authors as father of the [...]
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 [...]