Making art is a mode of revealing the world in new ways… For the past two weeks, I’ve been writing about the opportunity to make a new Catholic culture, not from scratch and not from attempts to appropriate whatever happens to be popular at the moment, but from the immense resources available in the tradition [...]
Conservatives must once again put contemplation before action, or else their energies will be wasted. They cannot continue to trim the upper branches of politics while the roots of culture wither and die from inattention… There is an aspect to the conservative abandonment of culture I find distressing: the increasing politicization within the conservative movement. [...]
In my adult life, I have never witnessed such a randomly violent spring and summer as we have had this year: priests murdered while saying Mass; Turkish troops surrounding U.S. military bases; police being executed while on duty; police reacting to stresses (too often poorly) beyond the imagination of most of us; trucks driving through [...]
On my religious position, I have been classified as a Protestant, a Catholic, an anti-semitic, and as a typical Jew; politically, as a Liberal, a Fascist, a National Socialist, and a Conservative; and on my theoretical position, as a Platonist, a Neo-Augustinian, a Thomist, a disciple of Hegel, an existentialist, a historical relativist, and an [...]
“I should like to record my own love and my children’s love of E.A. Wyke-Smith’s Marvellous Land of Snergs,” reads an endorsement on the cover of that book. The endorser is J.R.R. Tolkien, and it was very kind of him to offer the guidance. Without him, it is likely we would only have visited a [...]
When I was a young Anglican priest in England, it was part of my daily routine to walk the half-mile across town for Evening Prayer in the parish church. My path took me past a neighbor whom I knew to be a Jehovah’s Witness. This particular JW was the sort of man who woke up [...]
In the last months, particularly after the Supreme Court decision on homosexual marriage in late June, I’ve noticed a pronounced malaise in many of my friends and family. For some, this looks awfully close to despair, for others a scornful anger, with a kind of dazed escapism, haunting yet others hoping they are in a [...]
My grandmother’s passing represents the passing of a historical era; however, her death ultimately symbolizes something at once both far more profound and more commonplace. The most important thing about my grandmother’s death is that it will be undone. My grandmother proposed to my wife months before I did. They’d just met the day before, [...]
One of the most popular and enduring films, and fast on its way to becoming a timeless classic, features murder, nudity, adultery, savage violence, homosexual rape, and suicide. The movie is Frank Darabont’s Shawshank Redemption. Based on a novella by Stephen King, the film recounts the story of uptight banker Andy Dufresne, who is locked [...]
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI almost a year after the June 2004 death of Ronald Reagan. I don’t know if Ratzinger and Reagan ever met, though there’s a chance they did during one of Reagan’s visits to the Vatican to meet with Pope John Paul II, especially his first and most prominent visit, [...]
From the The Matrix Hope, it is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness.–The Architect (The Matrix Reloaded) For more on the Matrix Trilogy visit The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore. […]