In almost every way, J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Passage of the Marshes” presents a deeply frightening and suffocating experience for the reader, as the two Hobbits and the decrepit Gollum move across a landscape that has become devoid of grace… While nearly every decent human being under the age of sixty-five loves and appreciates J.R.R. Tolkien’s [...]
Jerry Ewing’s greatest achievements in Wonderous Stories are to show conclusively that progressive rock never died and continues to thrive; and that it’s a vital and vibrant cultural expression, worthy of all due scholarly and cultural attention… Wonderous Stories: A Journey Through the Landscape of Progressive Rock by Jerry Ewing (167 pages, Flood Gallery Publishing, 2018) [...]
For Father Tom, everything was larger in life, because he could see past our weaknesses and our failings. For Father Tom saw what God made a person to be, not what the person did stupidly with his own free will. When Father Tom looked at us, when he smiled at us, he did so with [...]
If James Madison offered the American republic a five-course meal of epicurean excellence, Roger Sherman was the short-order fry cook in the nearest greasy spoon, a block or two away from Independence Square. The Collected Works of Roger Sherman ed. Mark David Hall (840 pages, Liberty Fund, 2016) “Sherman’s air is the reverse of grace; there [...]
As if to create the cruelest irony possible, as the terrorist ideologies arose, Americans surrendered their own republican inheritance, their own Augustinian and Puritan caution, and their traditionally humane morality to the new god: “Progress.” It was nothing less than a new faith… When did it all go wrong? As Christopher Dawson used to note [...]
Our heritage of foreign intervention is a new one, an innovation introduced by the progressives. To imagine a clean and humane progressivism is, simply, a fool’s errand. Just how much imperialism is in the DNA—so to write—of the American character? When Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his famous address, “The Significance of the Frontier in American [...]
As revolutionary as they claimed to be, the French Revolutionaries were as old as sin, Edmund Burke assured his readers. “Trace them through all their artifices, frauds, and violences,” he argued, and “you can find nothing at all that is new.” Roughly four-fifths into his spectacular Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke paused. [...]
Stories of glass and stone—which told of the holy and sainted—convinced young Christopher Dawson that a saint was a saint not because of his or her individual talents, but as a continuation of the deepest longings and desires of the Church. In 1889, when Henry Christopher Dawson entered the world, he did so with style. [...]
It would be difficult to find a more beautiful republican thought in all of Edmund Burke’s writings than this: “A man full of warm speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it; but a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the most of the existing [...]
The French Revolutionaries, Edmund Burke rightly understood, sought not just the overturning of the old, but, critically, they also desired the destruction of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Only by lying about the nature of the human person could they accomplish their goals… One of the most important duties of any good person, [...]
Not only was Flannery O’Connor one of the most important Christian Humanists of the twentieth century, but she also well understood what made Christian Humanism what it was. While it might very well be conservative, it was always imaginative, allowing one to imagine what must be conserved. The Presence of Grace by Flannery O’Connor (192 pages, [...]
Russell Kirk thought that because justice is rooted in nature and because in its perfection transcends all time and space, one can innately observe virtue in the actions of wise women and men. Such observation of our heroes and those we admire might be the best teacher in our current day, serving as reminders of [...]
The job of every conservative is twofold: First, he must fight tirelessly against the centralized, unitary state; second, he must do everything possible to promote that which makes the free society not just an ordered one, but a good one. Prior to the publication of Russell Kirk’s masterful The Conservative Mind in 1953, no real [...]
Power, in and of itself, has become an “ideology,” according to Robert Nisbet. It is, by its very nature, incapable of understanding nuance… As I had the opportunity to write in my previous essay for The Imaginative Conservative, Oxford University Press gave the grand sociologist and historian of ideas, Robert A. Nisbet, a chance to [...]