Christian humility is clearly what Flannery O'Connor's protagonists most lack. What characterizes them in its absence is pride, which O’Connor attributed to inherent sinfulness. Her protagonists undergo powerful spiritual transformations that result from discomfiting experiences effected by the grace of God. Flannery O’Connor’s Religious Imagination: A World with Everything Off Balance, by George A. Kilcourse, [...]
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 each human soul cannot be explained. “To define art is [...]
What’s “imaginative?” What’s “conservative?” And how does the adjective modify the noun and the noun support its adjective? My first and last care is not politics but education. Education seems to me inherently conservative, being the transmission, and thus the saving, of a tradition’s treasures of fiction and thought. But education is also inherently imaginative. [...]
The film “Field of Dreams” beautifully portrays in a contemporary idiom the Parable of the Prodigal Son, but even more so, the grand cosmic drama to which that Parable points: that of Paradise lost and Paradise regained. In view of the beginning of baseball season, and as the father of two Little Leaguers, I thought [...]
Here is a sonnet for Ascension Day, the glorious finale of the Easter Season. In the mystery of the Ascension we reflect on the way in which, in one sense, Christ ‘leaves’ us and is taken away into Heaven, but in another sense he is given to us and to the world in a new and more [...]
Absent joy, absent the vision and expectation of eternal happiness, we lose ourselves in the immediate. When we forget about our final end, we become absorbed in the means, in technique, in minutia.It is necessary to find our way back to joy, to rekindle that flame. Much ink has been spilled in distinguishing among the [...]
The sacramental imagination must not be an exercise in the imaginary. It must traffic in images of reality that include the startlingly beautiful, the ugly, and the outwardly disagreeable but inwardly luminous. Writing in the early 1840s, the then-Anglican John Henry Newman proposed to a friend that a good article could be written with the [...]
By viewing Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” as a type of saintly hagiography, and Quixote’s actions and motives as following the example of St. Ignatius of Loyola, Don Quixote turns into San Quixote, a knight who fights not on the plains of Spain but on a spiritual plane, by means of his illuminating imagination. Gallivanting through the [...]
Graham Greene classified his 1958 novel "Our Man in Havana" as one of his lighter pieces or “entertainments,” yet which allows for a surprising amount of spiritual substance. “The moral imagination is… man’s power to perceive ethical truth, abiding law, in the seeming chaos of many events.” –Russell Kirk In his book The Catholic Writer [...]
The apologist should appeal not only to one’s reason and intellect but also to one’s imagination, wooing the unbeliever—or a believer who has only granted intellectual consent rather than full-heart surrender—to Christ. In answer to the question “[w]hy did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about [...]
“Imagination rules the world,” Russell Kirk used to say.[1] He meant that imagination is a force that molds the clay of our sentiments and understanding.[2] It is not chiefly through calculations, formulas, and syllogisms, but by means of images, myths, and stories that we comprehend our relation to God, to nature, to others, and to the self. [...]
Great books introduce us to ideas and to ways of looking at the world that are new to us. They provide a refreshing distance from the trends, fashions, tastes, opinions, and political correctness of our current culture. Great books invite us to put aside for a while our way of looking at the world and [...]
Owen Barfield argued that the modern world must readopt the truths of the Logos, should Western Civilization move beyond its current selfish and totalitarian phase. And this rediscovered love of the Logos must express itself throughout culture and the arts. In 1944, over a decade after Lewis’s conversion to Christianity, half a decade after Tolkien’s [...]
For the conservative Benjamin Disraeli, the answers to the political problems of the present lie in the restoration of the ideals of the past. Restoration is not an attempt to reject the present and escape or return to an earlier state of a society; it is rather a creative, imaginative effort to infuse the present [...]