Glenn Arbery Archives ~ The Imaginative Conservative

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 [...]

The Deep Power of Joy

By Glenn Arbery|2020-05-12T00:08:04-05:00March 7th, 2020|Categories: Culture, Education, Glenn Arbery, Nature, Poetry, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

Wordsworth’s introspection in “Tintern Abbey” leads him to attempt to answer the question we ask with our curriculum at our college: How does the experience of unforgettable natural beauty in the full vitality of youth affect the moral and spiritual life that follows? As all the world should know, the curriculum at Wyoming Catholic [...]

Little Women, J-Lo, and Eve

By Glenn Arbery|2020-02-14T12:58:25-06:00February 14th, 2020|Categories: Culture, Feminism, Film, Glenn Arbery, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

What are women? Despite my daily presence to my daughters’ lives, their sisterhood remains an enigma. A complex emotional bond exists among the seven of them, a self-enclosed feminine world that I can see and understand, but never truly enter. “Little Women” reminded me of that. What are women, anyway? I’m confused. Recent events, not to mention what [...]

Why the Young Shouldn’t Turn Their Backs on Politics

By Glenn Arbery|2020-06-11T13:29:53-05:00February 1st, 2020|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Conservatism, Glenn Arbery, Modernity, Politics, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

Forming good manners and helping to make our country beautiful—not cynically undercutting our institutions—is part of the task of education. Our students must know that we can never concede the fight to those who would plunge our institutions into the abyss of ideological slavery, and who wish to undercut the understanding of shared responsibility [...]

Glenn Arbery’s Southern Gothic

By Dwight Longenecker|2020-01-31T22:21:39-06:00January 31st, 2020|Categories: Books, Dwight Longenecker, Fiction, Glenn Arbery, Imagination, Literature, Senior Contributors|

Glenn Arbery, in “Bearings and Distances,” uses bizarre humor, well-drawn characters, a wider landscape, and unexpected twists to expand the reach of Southern Gothic to critique more widespread contagions of modernity: the superficiality of academia, the hypocrisy of conventional religion, the sour legacy of slavery, the suffocating spiral of promiscuity, and the terror of [...]

The Divine Measure: Changing the Culture of Death

By Glenn Arbery|2020-01-23T16:50:08-06:00January 23rd, 2020|Categories: Abortion, Culture, Glenn Arbery, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

Abortion long ago became a natural symbol for the loss of a spiritual center. Not divine law, but individual will is the measure, and rejecting the child within the body becomes its expression. Challenging Roe v. Wade is not a matter of standing in judgment against women, but of changing a culture of death. [...]

The Coming of the Lord

By Glenn Arbery|2019-12-21T14:50:32-06:00December 21st, 2019|Categories: Advent, Christianity, Christmas, Culture, Glenn Arbery, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

In this Advent season, we wait in expectation, we hope for the coming of the Lord Who has come and Who is coming and Who will come again. We remind ourselves of His absence from the lives of so many in the world today, and we pray that graces may come to cure us [...]

The Grace of Owing

By Glenn Arbery|2019-11-28T00:46:38-06:00November 27th, 2019|Categories: Classical Education, Education, Glenn Arbery, Liberal Arts, Senior Contributors, Thanksgiving, Wyoming Catholic College|

To be truly grateful means that one holds oneself in the grace of owing. It means alert and noble attention to the good intended by the giver. Giving thanks is such a beautifully natural gesture that it seems almost perverse to admire someone for not making it. But Dr. Samuel Johnson earns such admiration [...]