Imagination

A Sketch of Heaven

Let us picture a woman thrown into a dungeon. There she bears and rears a son. He grows up seeing nothing but the dungeon walls, the straw on the floor, and a little patch of the sky seen...

Politics and the Imagination

Applying imagination to politics can lead to political wish-fulfillment fantasies or to the enlivening of real communities from within... The topic "Politics and the Imagination" is at once larger and more restricted than "Politics and the Arts,"...

Imaginative Origins of Modernity: Life as Daydream & Nightmare

Although modernity contains other and contrasting elements, it may be permissible to call the new type of person simply "modern man." His demeanor is very different from that of premodern man. Far from discounting the opportunities of a worldly existence, this person entertains great expectations... Today’s...

Imagination and Conservatism

Our world drowns in information, facts, bites, noise, opinions, and other particulars. Yet, even the best of our students have the most difficult time connecting one thing to another. It is myth that allows us to transcend the immediate and the ephemeral...

The Moral Imagination & Imaginative Conservatism

Moral imagination runs not incidentally but necessarily in tandem with a certain aspect of conservatism, what I think of as imaginative conservatism... The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling, by Gertrude Himmelfarb (259 pages, Ivan R. Dee, 2006)

The Imaginative Historian: Forrest McDonald & the Art of History

Many believe that objectivity is the historian’s goal. But Forrest McDonald believed that history by its very nature entails artifice; the historian is not simply a mere recorder or reporter of events, but also an artist... “History is marble, and remains forever cold, even under the...

“The Blue Cross”

Has it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hear men’s real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil?... Between the silver ribbon of morning and the green glittering...

The Mysteries of Madness and Genius

The world has long sought to explain the mysteries of madness and genius and has largely failed to do so. Perhaps the better idea would be simply to allow madness and genius to go on explaining the world’s own mysteries to itself... Today’s offering in our...

Russell Kirk and the Moral Imagination

The "moral imagination" goes beyond our personal, individual experiences to help us fathom the depths of human dignity in light of God’s creation... Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Robert Stacey as he explores the moral imagination, as...

The Beautiful Violence of Old Masters Painting

The “beautiful violence” of Old Masters painting, a magnificence rooted in the study of Light and Dark as technique, as style, but most of all as a symbolic representation of the very essence of life on earth, remains timeless for its sublime understanding of that which for...

Finished in Beauty and Memories: The Poetry of Catharine Brosman

In their ego-centered quest for radical originality, too many contemporary poets fail to keep in mind what Catharine Brosman reminds us is the poet’s primary obligation in every age: “to say the oldest thing in the world as though it had never been said before”...

Why Wardrobes Are for Grown-Ups Too

The value of fairy stories lies in the fact that they serve as a lens by which the heavenly can be seen on the earth, a lens by which the deepest and most important realities are grasped. They allow us to judge evil from the perspective of...

Imagination and Creation in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens’ poetry is replete with examples of this effort to understand and articulate the poet as creator of things and meaning... Wallace Stevens wrote in a letter to a friend that “fter all, I like...

On Studying Imagination

Is memory deceptively transformative? Is the original imagination an organ for lying fictions, for deception, or a conduit for revelatory illumination? And so, more generally, how do we explain those images that are apparently not imitations, don’t have an origin in verifiable originals, be they stored in...