The day of the printed journal of imagination—dealing with ideas, literature, and poetry—seems to be fading. To be sure, it has been fading rather dramatically ever since the Second World War. Political and ideologically-oriented magazines, specialized academic journals packed full of discipline-specific jargon, and even the so-called best sellers have replaced the journals of imagination. [...]
Sadly, very few Americans remember Canon Bernard Iddings Bell (1886-1958)—this, despite the excellent work done by Cicero Bruce and Lee Cheek in his name. And, in his own day and age, Bell served as one of the leading scholars of what would eventually be called conservatism. He relentlessly defended the western canon and the liberal [...]
“Your mother died to save you. If there is one thing that Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. He didn’t realize that love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves a mark.”—Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (1997) Sometime around the year 2000, I was flying to Houston. On the way to the Detroit [...]
No creature in all of creation has it as difficult as do humans. Being flesh as well as spirit, humans share in the natures of both the animals and the angels. Unlike either, however, the human has true free will. We choose good and ill at every moment of our lives. Animals, merely creatures of [...]
“This is going to be a grim job for all of us, to put it mildly, but it’s… important. We owe those victims our best work, whether we rescue anyone alive or only recover remains.”— James Greer in Commander in Chief I am sure that I am not alone among The Imaginative Conservative community in [...]
In my previous essay, “Eric Voegelin: A Primer,” I had the privilege to offer a brief sketch of this German intellectual’s life and thought. In this essay, I would like to explore one of Voegelin’s three most important ideas: his critique of Gnosticism. As in the previous essay, I am drawing heavily upon the fine [...]
Seventeen years ago, I flew into Seattle. I do this a lot, but this was one of those flights. Not just any flight, but one of THOSE flights. The kind in which everything seems to go wrong. Delays, turbulence, more delays, and then a few more delays. By the time I got to my hotel in [...]
On my religious position, I have been classified as a Protestant, a Catholic, an anti-semitic, and as a typical Jew; politically, as a Liberal, a Fascist, a National Socialist, and a Conservative; and on my theoretical position, as a Platonist, a Neo-Augustinian, a Thomist, a disciple of Hegel, an existentialist, a historical relativist, and an [...]
Do you want to rule a world? Blow apart a sun? Test a theory of community? Explore the very depths of depravity? End slavery and misery? Destroy all empires? It is possible. . . At least in the imagination. The proper study of man is everything. The proper study of man as artist is everything [...]
Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” explores pretended and real madness, its plot twisting and turning in ways perhaps only logical to the perplexing soul of its director. As with all his best movies, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) brutally analyzes modernity, finding it schizophrenic and wanting. In contrast to the stripped-down minimalism of Rope, which also stars Jimmy Stewart, Vertigo is in every way [...]
In a critical moment in the plot of Stephen King’s It: A Novel, the protagonist finds himself distraught over a grade his creative writing teacher has given him for what he considered a first-rate story. The story comes back from the instructor with an F slashed into the title page. Two words are scrawled beneath, [...]
The Imaginative Conservative is pleased to announce its 2015 Book of the Year: Bradley J. Birzer's Russell Kirk: American Conservative. This is the first in what will be an annual recognition given by the editors of The Imaginative Conservative to the book published during the calendar year that best enhances our understanding of conservatism. As Robert Stacey said in his review in [...]
While very few modern conservatives—especially those who sell conservatism as a consumer product—even remember the movement’s founder, Russell Kirk, those who do remember him often do so by envisioning him as an antiquated relic, having passed from this world long after he had contributed much to it. At best, Kirk might well represent a pre-1960s [...]
Even J.R.R. Tolkien, interestingly enough, could not pinpoint exactly when the mythology began. One can most certainly date the mythology if only in its barest, least recognizable form sometime prior to his participation in the Great War, when the young man wrote his poem, “The Voyage of Eärendil the Evening Star.”[1] In a letter written [...]