Glenn Arbery Archives ~ The Imaginative Conservative

Core Exercises and the Coming Election

By Glenn Arbery|2020-09-22T11:16:18-05:00September 21st, 2020|Categories: Civil Society, Glenn Arbery, Wyoming Catholic College|

Does our modern body politic, like the human body, have a core? Obviously not. In fact, it seems fair to say that no one, culturally speaking, feels anything but disorientation and dislocation in this world of COVID and radical political division. Indeed, this election season rouses more dread of coming unrest, regardless of who wins, [...]

Habit and Grace

By Glenn Arbery|2020-09-19T11:00:48-05:00September 19th, 2020|Categories: Glenn Arbery, Great Books, Homer, Iliad, Senior Contributors, St. Thomas Aquinas, Wyoming Catholic College|

The “Iliad” shows us human nature under extreme duress. Understanding Agamemnon and the consequences of his actions gives us a complex gauge of character. We come to recognize how often in daily life surprises come and how much they reveal that we stand in need of grace. Poor Agamemnon. At the very outset of [...]

Remembering the Normal

By Glenn Arbery|2020-08-31T15:05:43-05:00August 31st, 2020|Categories: Christianity, Community, Glenn Arbery, Happiness, Nature, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

As this strange summer of a strange year comes to an end, I am reminded of ordinary realities and experiences that now appear in a new light. At our college, classes started back up, and I cannot recall a happier sense of new beginning, partly because this, too, has been defamiliarized. On Sunday of [...]

Science and the Beauty of Being

By Glenn Arbery|2020-08-18T14:28:37-05:00August 19th, 2020|Categories: Beauty, Glenn Arbery, Nature, Science, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

Omissions of formal and final causes in the modern scientific project lead to a sense of meaninglessness. Bringing them back allows a crucial reinterpretation of the evidence of modern science: that matter carries within it its own divine purposiveness, and it moves by its nature into greater and greater complexities of order and beauty. [...]

Summer Reading: Good Books for Strange Times

By Glenn Arbery|2020-08-01T23:44:22-05:00July 25th, 2020|Categories: Books, Christianity, Education, Glenn Arbery, Literature, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

Despite all efforts to cancel good sense, common decency, a real sense of justice, respect for the law, and fear of God, these things will reassert themselves, as will the gifts of faith, hope, and charity. What better summer reading for an age of martyrs than the great works of the Western tradition that [...]

Blaming Adam

By Glenn Arbery|2020-07-04T01:23:42-05:00July 4th, 2020|Categories: American Republic, Christianity, Glenn Arbery, John Milton, Politics, Senior Contributors, Slavery, Wyoming Catholic College|

The origins of human things are flawed, no question, and inequalities remain. But should we not try to honor the principles of Washington or Jefferson and distinguish them from the prejudices of the day that they shared? The curriculum at Wyoming Catholic College has much wisdom to offer in the current crisis, much that [...]

A Song for America

By Glenn Arbery|2020-07-21T18:40:13-05:00July 3rd, 2020|Categories: American Republic, Christianity, Culture, Glenn Arbery, Independence Day, Liberty, Music, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

Katherine Lee Bates’ “America the Beautiful” conveys the incalculable beauty of virtue that America can exhibit by exercising self-control and taking on the high responsibilities of self-rule. Our prayer is that the anomalies of this year do not overcome us, and that our nation will recall itself and find again the greatness of soul [...]

The Poet and the Universe of Thought

By Glenn Arbery|2020-05-20T11:44:41-05:00May 22nd, 2020|Categories: Christianity, Glenn Arbery, Great Books, Literature, Poetry, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

The poet relies upon on a shared understanding that gives his imagination the oxygen to sustain it. The world lacks certitude about its direction, and we want most of all to awaken the poetic powers urgently necessary for the long rebuilding that lies ahead. For the past month or so, I have been doing [...]

Masks and Uncertainties

By Glenn Arbery|2020-05-14T19:01:24-05:00May 14th, 2020|Categories: Coronavirus, Glenn Arbery, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

Most of us Americans sense a great underlying health that has paradoxically reemerged during and despite this pandemic. Most of us feel a fresh appreciation for our families, our homes, our friends, our daily bread. This situation has given us a renewed appreciation for the freedom to make our own decisions, to exercise prudence, and [...]

Homage to Shakespeare

By Glenn Arbery|2020-05-14T17:08:10-05:00April 25th, 2020|Categories: Glenn Arbery, Imagination, Literature, Senior Contributors, 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 [...]

Online Learning, the Current Crisis, & Reading Alone

By Glenn Arbery|2020-04-17T17:55:31-05:00April 17th, 2020|Categories: Books, Culture, Education, Glenn Arbery, Liberal Learning, Senior Contributors, Writing, Wyoming Catholic College|

Our college, like most others, has adopted the new mode of “distance learning” during the current crisis. What if our students begin to learn a new kind of engagement with the written word precisely because of this momentary break from the habits of life at school and of absence from each other? I can’t [...]

Legalizing the Resurrection

By Glenn Arbery|2020-04-09T12:22:45-05:00April 10th, 2020|Categories: Conservatism, Easter, Glenn Arbery, Modernity, Religion, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, Wyoming Catholic College|

Many in our society consider religion merely an instrument of power, and they believe that the “correction” of inherited beliefs and practices can be forced upon the unwilling. But there’s an enormous difference between people who choose the real common good and people forced to submit to a state ideology. Today’s offering in our [...]

Finding the Center

By Glenn Arbery|2020-04-02T15:30:26-05:00April 2nd, 2020|Categories: Coronavirus, Glenn Arbery, Imagination, Literature, Poetry, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

No one knows what will happen with COVID-19—whether it will spread and peak and go away, or whether it will stay around for years, even centuries, as the plague did in Europe. It is good nonetheless to remember that true culture arises out of the joy and beauty we find anyway in the midst [...]

The New March Madness

By Glenn Arbery|2020-03-21T09:07:06-05:00March 21st, 2020|Categories: Coronavirus, Culture, Education, Glenn Arbery, History, Literature, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

We were all riding high only recently, and suddenly, there’s not enough on the shelves of the grocery stores. How should we think about it all? The virtue of a curriculum like that at our college is that the sweep of it encompasses the memory of the most extraordinary challenges to human nature. Pandemics [...]