It’s that time again. Another year is wending its way to a close and we’re all preoccupied with preparations for Christmas. This being so, I thought I’d offer my personal selection of books, published in 2019, which I feel would make good gifts for those imaginative conservatives in our lives. […]
Though fate is strong, there is a First Mover who transcends the revolutions of Fortune’s Wheel. In our world of perpetual change, all is in flux; even the mightiest tree will someday fall and the broadest river turn to dust. Yet the First Cause rises above these temporal twists and turns. Author’s Introduction: Imagine if [...]
Charles Williams joined the Inklings immediately after Oxford University Press moved its offices from London to Oxford because of the war with Germany. Though C.S. Lewis found Williams’ work compelling, even life-changing, the other members expressed doubts. “I had a pleasant evening on Thursday with Williams, Tolkien, and Wrenn, during which Wrenn expressed ALMOST seriously [...]
The nineteenth century was a difficult and dynamic period for the French nation, as citizens of all classes and philosophical persuasions struggled to come to terms with modernity. These struggles are reflected in Gustave Flaubert’s first novel, Madame Bovary, published as a complete text in 1857. The story is well-known: Emma Bovary finds herself in [...]
Memorization gives honor to the past, both with our time, which is required for memorization, and with our attention, our willingness to make the past part of ourselves. It seeks the voices of truth, goodness, or beauty, whenever they first lived, and listens. At the risk of sounding trite, memorization is the imaginative, conservative discipline [...]
Written in the after-shock of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Siegfried Sassoon’s “Litany of the Lost” laments the dehumanizing and destructive effects of technology. If Sassoon emerges as something of a prophet in the lines of this poem, he is something of a prophet at a loss. Who exactly is to deliver us from ourselves? We did [...]
In the beginning, the cosmos unfurls and lights The darkness of nothingness: a symphony. In the beginning, God speaks, delights In us, and speaks himself in harmony. […]
Lord David Cecil not only contributed more to the Inklings overall than did some of its other members, he was also the first of the Inklings to achieve fame, though few remember him now. Though most scholars have focused on C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams as the key Inklings, the other [...]
I looked down that bonnie road And on it did I tread. It often seemed the road of life, But sometimes of the dead. […]
The mature man is the one who not only honors vows and oaths, but who, when he breaks them, confesses his crime, feels shame for his failure, and seeks to make right what he has violated. Shrugging off one’s moral failings, acting as if they don’t matter, is not a sign of maturity but an [...]
A deep and sympathetic biography of the troubled eighteenth-century proto-Romantic poet and classicist, William Cowper, The Stricken Deer (1929) reveals the genius of its author, a young and determined Lord David Cecil, one of the most important, if forgotten, members of the Inklings. Cecil found the key to understanding Cowper in the mad poet’s embrace [...]
Many authors use imagery to create atmosphere, and in short fiction, that efficient imagery is vital. It may be a particular environment for their characters, but in the case of science fiction, it is also an ample tool of criticism, one in this case that has a lingering bite. […]
I know that many in your age have ceased to believe in the devil, but the evil of which I speak is a real thing. No, it is not real in the sense that goodness is real; evil, after all, is not a positive thing but a perversion and corruption of the good. Still, it [...]
If it is the case that time never makes its appearance out in the world but only motion is in evidence, then either time is not or it is in the only other venue of which I can think, inside our soul. Let me first explain my odd-sounding title. It is a variation on the [...]