Glenn Arbery Archives ~ The Imaginative Conservative

Letting Shakespeare Be

By Glenn Arbery|2026-04-22T14:59:37-05:00April 22nd, 2026|Categories: Glenn Arbery, Literature, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, William Shakespeare|

The default position with Shakespeare is to favor bold revisions over the poetic wisdom in the plays themselves. Why not let Shakespeare be what he is? In a recent piece for the New York Times, Drew Lichtenberg, the artistic producer at the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, laments the closing of the California Shakespeare Theater [...]

Easter for Misfits

By Glenn Arbery|2026-04-06T20:48:45-05:00April 6th, 2026|Categories: Christianity, Easter, Flannery O'Connor, Glenn Arbery, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, Wyoming Catholic College|

For those doing all right by themselves like Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit, Christ’s Resurrection from the dead throws everything off balance because it introduces something entirely new. To believe the testimony of the Gospels opens avenues to happiness that are entirely discomfiting to the complacency of mere identity. Flannery O’Connor had a way of compressing whole [...]

Snowbound

By Glenn Arbery|2026-01-22T20:22:20-06:00January 22nd, 2026|Categories: Catholicism, Glenn Arbery, Literature, Poetry, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, Wyoming Catholic College|

Being memorably snowbound in a concentrated, deeply human circle of friends and family is a “Truce of God” in the middle of endless activity. What is it about stories told in this kind of context? What is it about memories that bring both a sense of poignant loss but also the joy of renewed presence [...]

A Disquieting Immortality

By Glenn Arbery|2025-11-30T17:00:32-06:00November 30th, 2025|Categories: Film, Glenn Arbery, John Milton, Literature, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

What’s unnerving about Guillermo del Toro’s "Frankenstein" is that it embraces and glorifies the creature in ways that remind me, on one hand, of the Romantic valorization of Milton’s Satan, and on the other, of our contemporary headlong development of artificial intelligence. Like Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus (not a great play), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (not [...]

We Will Give Thanks

By Glenn Arbery|2025-11-26T20:08:22-06:00November 26th, 2025|Categories: Glenn Arbery, Thanksgiving, Timeless Essays, Wyoming Catholic College|

For most of us, Thanksgiving gives rise to some of the best memories of childhood, perhaps because the day is not complicated by the dramatic rituals and more profound emotions of other holidays. I think of my mother's America now, and I know that we have not lost it entirely, even in the divisions of [...]

Veterans Day

By Glenn Arbery|2025-11-10T19:46:55-06:00November 10th, 2025|Categories: American Republic, Glenn Arbery, Patriotism, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, Veterans Day, Wyoming Catholic College|

For most of our veterans, it should go without saying that military discipline and experience give them a moral authority. It is a recognition—once universal—that is too often forgotten in an age when patriotism itself seems suspect to many. On this day when we honor our veterans, it’s good to recollect both the debt of [...]

The Case for Tragedy

By Glenn Arbery|2025-09-29T14:05:34-05:00September 29th, 2025|Categories: Glenn Arbery, Greek Epic Poetry, Homer, Iliad, Literature, Senior Contributors|

What is the good of seeing a terrible state of soul displayed onstage, disclosed in all its humiliation and rage? After my first morning of classes at Wyoming Catholic College on August 27, I returned to the office to find the news of the shootings at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis all over the internet. [...]

Honor and Fame

By Glenn Arbery|2025-09-09T18:59:57-05:00September 9th, 2025|Categories: Aristotle, Conservatism, Culture, Glenn Arbery, Homer, Plato, Timeless Essays, William Shakespeare, Wyoming Catholic College|

Should honor and fame no longer be ends of ambition in such a world? The ancient philosophers doubted the ultimate merit of fame, but they also looked for the most spirited students, those most inclined to “undertake extensive and arduous enterprises." In response to my essay about baptizing ambition, a friend from Boston College recommended [...]

Homage to Shakespeare

By Glenn Arbery|2025-04-23T09:34:00-05:00April 22nd, 2025|Categories: Glenn Arbery, Imagination, Literature, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, William Shakespeare, Wyoming Catholic College|

The first spark of genuine engagement with great writers most often comes from a teacher, and the ever-fresh immortality of the great work has its ironic contrast in the aging and death of those who made the introduction. So it is for me with Shakespeare, who was first truly impressed upon my imagination during my [...]

Sitting Bull and the Wrath of Achilles

By Glenn Arbery|2025-03-10T19:46:54-05:00March 10th, 2025|Categories: American West, Glenn Arbery, History, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, War, Wyoming Catholic College|

The story of the Indian Wars for the American West in Peter Cozzens’s “The Earth Is Weeping” contains the tragic patterns of all human history. This history, like all real history, lives once we awaken memory and see the real contours of what lies before us. One of the compensations for long hours in the [...]

Resolutions and Irresolutions

By Glenn Arbery|2024-12-31T18:43:00-06:00December 31st, 2024|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Epiphany, Glenn Arbery, New Year's Day, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, Wyoming Catholic College|

The faith of our students has a Spartan or Roman openness to it, something Magian, that deeply respects the full reality of things. They understand that our deepest analogy to God is submission to the truth, but they know from this education that seeing the truth of God’s will in crucial decisions might require patience [...]

Approaching Thanks

By Glenn Arbery|2024-11-26T14:34:14-06:00November 26th, 2024|Categories: Glenn Arbery, Great Books, Plato, Senior Contributors, Thanksgiving, Timeless Essays, Wyoming Catholic College|

The word for truth in Greek means the absence of forgetting—the sudden recollection, the vivid recovery. In the great tradition of the West, when those who study it retrieve immense and priceless knowledge from forgetfulness, we find the hope of renewal. As we approach Thanksgiving this year, the coronavirus phenomenon helps us value rightly what [...]

Poetry and Holding the Center

By Glenn Arbery|2024-11-16T09:44:25-06:00November 15th, 2024|Categories: Glenn Arbery, Poetry, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, Wyoming Catholic College|

Much as there might be to say today about things falling apart, my point has less to do with the disintegration of civilization and more to do with the way that a poem committed to memory holds things together. Back in the early days of COVID 19, when churches were shutting out their parishioners and [...]

John Henry Newman: Conscience of the Age

By Glenn Arbery|2024-10-12T16:01:11-05:00October 12th, 2024|Categories: Catholicism, Glenn Arbery, Imagination, Moral Imagination, Senior Contributors, St. John Henry Newman, Timeless Essays, Virtue, Wyoming Catholic College|

What John Henry Newman says about conscience shocks the modern secular sensibility, which treats it (if at all) as the “socially constructed” result of any number of cultural influences. The conscience is a messenger from God: giving saints courage to resist tyranny, even unto death. by Emmeline Deane, oil on canvas, 1889 The [...]