Imagination

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...

Russell Kirk on the Moral Imagination

The principal difficulty of mankind today is the decay of the moral imagination in our civilization... In the spring of 1989, videographer Ken Martinek and I made the trip to Piety Hill to interview Russell about the moral imagination (as first conceived by Edmund Burke...

Why You Should Read and Write Poetry

In this dull utilitarian age, there seems little less useful than poetry. What good is it? There are few who get rich writing or publishing poetry, and when it comes to practicality, it is practically good for...

The Problem of Too Many Books

The exponential proliferation of books is a sign of our culture’s loss of an ultimate, shared purpose to life, and a consensus on how to achieve that purpose. Devoid of this consensus, each of us...

Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis”

The New Atlantis is at once a fable, a work of political philosophy, and a religious text. The god that it preaches on behalf of is the humanistic god of the Enlightenment— with reason, knowledge, science, and progress as its sacred values...

An Imaginative Whig: Reassessing the Life & Thought of Edmund Burke

The challenge for statesmen is to use historical experience as a guide to understanding civilization and then to reconstitute civilization in the specific circumstances of the day. Imagination is essential in the process of reconstitution because it is the human faculty that puts individuals in touch with...

Liberal Learning, Moral Worth, and Defecated Rationality

At best, what the typical college has offered its students, in recent decades, has been defecated rationality. By that term I mean a narrow rationalism or logicalism, purged of theology, moral philosophy, symbol and allegory, tradition, reverence, and the wisdom of our ancestors. This defecated rationality is...

The Conservatism of Robert Nisbet

Robert Nisbet, in direct contrast to Russell Kirk, argued that conservatism was purely a modern ideology. For Nisbet, the entire history of conservatism began as a reaction to the French Revolution... When it came to the history...

The Achievement of Russell Kirk

According to Russell Kirk, the moral imagination is the power of knowing man, despite his weaknesses and sinful nature, as a moral being, meant for eternity. It recognizes that human beings, after all, are created in the image of God... Russell...