The One, True, Imaginative Vision

By |2023-09-22T17:33:01-05:00September 22nd, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Heaven, Imagination|

This city, this Promised Land, this Banquet, is what all those who love God long for, and in order to see it, we must always be ready, like the virgins with the lamps, for God to break in and re-adjust our imaginative visions, our unexamined assumptions, our paradigms, to align with who He is, the [...]

Tolkien’s “The Children of Húrin”

By |2023-09-10T12:53:29-05:00September 10th, 2023|Categories: Books, Bradley J. Birzer, Fiction, Imagination, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literature, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, Tolkien Series|

How does one account for J.R.R. Tolkien’s seeming ability to live inside of mythology? He read it, he translated it, and he absorbed it. After all these grand things, he rewrote it. Yet, no matter how deeply he delved into the profound and pervasive paganisms of pre-Christian cultures, he never lost his ability to baptize [...]

Virgil on Courage

By |2023-08-07T21:41:56-05:00August 7th, 2023|Categories: Aeneas, Character, Heroism, Imagination, Letters From Dante Series, Louis Markos, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, Virgil|

Courage is found in unexpected places. It is not the sole province of soldiers, nor does it find its only fulfillment in the vanquishing of enemies. Indeed, courage manifests itself most powerfully, not in a single deed of valor, but in a lifetime of endurance. Author’s Introduction: Imagine if Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, and the [...]

What It Means to Be an Imaginative Conservative

By |2023-07-09T17:36:36-05:00July 9th, 2023|Categories: Conservatism, Culture, Imagination, John Creech, Timeless Essays|

If culture can neither thrive nor survive without religion, then a cultural conservative, which Russell Kirk claims is the most imaginative of conservatives, must fight to preserve the religious foundations of his culture. Apropos of the title of this online journal, I think it appropriate to offer a few Russell Kirk—inspired refections as to what [...]

The Romance of Faith & the Challenge to Secularism

By |2023-07-08T19:13:22-05:00July 8th, 2023|Categories: Blaise Pascal, C.S. Lewis, Christianity, Faith, G.K. Chesterton, Imagination, Michael De Sapio, Moral Imagination, Philosophy, Senior Contributors|

It’s usually only the rationalists and skeptics who find their way into the great surveys of thought. But religion always rises from the ashes. This is thanks in no small part to the imaginative thinkers who revealed Christianity as what it always was, although not always ideally expressed by us: a thing of mystery, romance, [...]

On the Road to Mecosta

By |2023-06-29T16:20:07-05:00June 29th, 2023|Categories: Imagination, John Horvat, Moral Imagination, Russell Kirk|

There must be places like Mecosta, hidden away from the world, where people can repair to ponder and consider the permanent things that matter. The course of rivers is often marked by rapids, which reflect excitement, dynamism and raw power. While rapids can be exhilarating, there is also a place for river pools and backwaters, [...]

Solzhenitsyn, Russell Kirk, & the Moral Imagination

By |2023-06-07T18:16:45-05:00June 7th, 2023|Categories: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Featured, Ideology, Moral Imagination, Russell Kirk, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

Alexander Solzhenitsyn illuminates the distinctive character of our age by bringing to bear a religiously grounded moral vision, and he filters this vision through his literary imagination. In the summer of 2003, I had to vacate my college office. With limited file-cabinet space at home, I had to lighten my files drastically. Reading and skimming [...]

A Failure of Imagination: Russell Kirk’s “The Cellar of Little Egypt”

By |2023-05-31T16:13:29-05:00May 30th, 2023|Categories: Books, Imagination, Literature, Russell Kirk|

“The Cellar of Little Egypt” is among the least appreciated of Russell Kirk’s many ghost stories. It is a tale about how businesses can be corrupted from internal forces, and it offers businessmen a shot of moral imagination. “The Cellar of Little Egypt” is among the least appreciated of Russell Kirk’s many ghost stories. Kirk [...]

Homer’s Advice for Husbands and Wives

By |2023-04-25T15:26:18-05:00April 25th, 2023|Categories: Homer, Imagination, Letters From Dante Series, Timeless Essays|

You teach your students that the men of the past looked upon their wives as chattel, that they saw them as possessions rather than as people of value and worth. How deeply mistaken you are; how far from the truth. Author’s Introduction: Imagine if Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, and the other great poets of ancient [...]

Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men”: The Agony of Will

By |2023-04-23T17:24:24-05:00April 23rd, 2023|Categories: Books, Imagination, Literature, Morality, Timeless Essays|

All the King’s Men (1946): It’s as if Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) wrote this classic American tale principally for college and university students. With a solid foundation in the liberal arts, they will recognize the philosophical and psychological theories that a central character, Jack Burden, has in mind when he transforms them into excuses for [...]

On the Spiritual and the Cultural Life

By |2023-04-15T12:10:23-05:00April 15th, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Culture, Imagination, Michael De Sapio, Senior Contributors|

The spiritual life (including the prayer and rites of religion) and the cultural life (including the artistic and intellectual cultivation of the human person in its countless forms) together ensure that life is more than a blind cycle, a march leading nowhere. They reveal the sense of our pilgrimage and light a path to our [...]

Soul and Story

By |2023-07-22T09:42:46-05:00April 14th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Imagination, Literature, Wyoming Catholic College|

“The world is too much with us,” Wordsworth wrote over 200 years ago, and we certainly understand what he means—but perhaps we do not understand well enough what the recourse might be. During their junior and senior years, students at Wyoming Catholic College move from a solid grounding in ancient thought into the complexities of [...]

America’s “Logres”: The Mythology of a Nation

By |2023-03-19T19:16:50-05:00March 19th, 2023|Categories: American Republic, C.S. Lewis, Culture, Flannery O'Connor, Imagination, Literature, Myth, Timeless Essays|

C.S. Lewis believed that every nation possesses what he called a “haunting,” a “Logres,” which baptizes it with a unique inner life. What, or where, is America’s Logres? Who is the mythological hero that could guide the American identity the way Arthur guided Britain and inspired generations of English poets and artists? During my undergraduate [...]

Educating the Moral Imagination: The Truth of Beauty

By |2023-03-13T15:25:16-05:00March 13th, 2023|Categories: Beauty, Benjamin Lockerd, Essential, Imagination, Literature, Moral Imagination, Poetry, Timeless Essays|

Moral imagination is capable of grasping truth and goodness in ways that move us passionately to live in those objective realities. The answers to the errors of modern times need to be given in philosophy and theology, but it is essential that we also experience the truth imaginatively. Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that [...]

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