T.S. Eliot reminds us that the answers to our soul’s depravity are all around us, in our collective culture—the books we read, the places we inhabit, the music we listen to—but also that culture can only survive if we remember it and keep it alive. “These things I do within, in that vast chamber of [...]
Education in the liberal arts is an ancient tradition that has slowly been eroded through our increasing attachment to approaching the world scientifically and pragmatically. The language of man reveals something significant about his nature and his relationship with the world. Language is so close to man’s nature that if it suffers a drastic change, [...]
Western civilization has been gutted from within. At the core of this moral bankruptcy is a watered-down Christianity that lacks the conviction to defend itself… Today mankind enjoys unprecedented technology, but lacks the wisdom to regard technology as a tool in the service of life, and not an end in itself. The difference between the [...]
The more silence can become a way of life in this noisy age, the more a new culture will radiate from its blessings… Last week I suggested that, despite the drift of Western culture, a time like ours can actually shelter a deep hope for renewal. The Catholic historian Christopher Dawson, with his long perspective, has [...]
It is hard, as a modern, to know the right questions to ask, to know when all questions fall silent in the presence of absolute Truth, of Revelation. In his final book, The Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis writes about the Mediaeval world view: “All the apparent contradictions must be harmonised. A Model must be built which [...]
Modestly, without arrogance or triumphalism, our graduates will be the mustard seeds of cultural transformation… Graduation is always a bittersweet time, because we have come to know the students so well, from many different sides. It is not a matter of delving into their privacy, but of seeing them in different contexts—classes, outdoor trips, liturgical [...]
The future is bright for conservatives. If conservatism is understood as somehow a post-modern phenomenon, we will no longer labor under the tiresome accusation that we are on the wrong side of history and therefore irrelevant… In the late 1970s, if you had asked someone what a conservative was, the answer would have been easy. [...]
Without defending the citadel of the mind, how can we build a beautiful city? Without the conviction of true propositions, whence do we think beauty will come?… In Conversations with Roger Scruton (2016), Mark Dooley engages in a fascinating book-length interview with the famous English philosopher. While best known academically for unfashionable arguments on behalf [...]
Philosopher Charles Taylor is insistent that we are all “secular,” by which he means, denied of the “naive” experience of religion as encountered in the pre-modern world. See how much you agree or disagree with Dr. Taylor by taking this quiz… Charles Taylor As many of The Imaginative Conservative’s readers already know, the [...]
The tragedy of modern education is that it has left us perilously ignorant of who we are, where we are, where we have come from, and where we are going. We are lost and blissfully unaware that we are heading for the abyss… Many years ago the English writer G.K. Chesterton claimed that the “coming [...]
In defining the Great Divide as that between Old Western Man and New Western Man, C.S. Lewis has given us a radically new way of looking at the past. I write not as an expert to tell you of my thought but to explain a particular concept of Lewis’s and my own application of it [...]
There seems to be very little cultural space for humanistic studies. It is difficult to perceive how literature, philosophy, or theology could contribute to technological capitalism… I would like you to imagine the following situation: Sometime after graduation a college student is hired as an intern at his university’s newly founded Center for Leadership Studies [...]
Alexis de Tocqueville, while traveling through the dense woods in Michigan, in 1831, came across a pioneer and his family, making the “first step toward civilization in the wilds.”[1] He noted in his travel diary that “from time to time along the road one comes to new clearings. As all these settlements are exactly like [...]
The Copernican Revolution elevated the scientist above the stars, planets, and Earth to a position of the highest being in the cosmos. The Myth Like most, if not all religions, science has a creation myth that proclaims a new cosmic situation. The Copernican myth tells how science began and, like all myths, is recited again [...]