Glenn Arbery Archives ~ The Imaginative Conservative

Easter for Misfits

By Glenn Arbery|2021-04-10T11:39:42-05:00April 9th, 2021|Categories: Christianity, Easter, Flannery O'Connor, Glenn Arbery, Senior Contributors, 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 [...]

Shakespeare’s Rome

By Glenn Arbery|2021-03-26T12:58:05-05:00March 26th, 2021|Categories: Glenn Arbery, Great Books, Rome, Senior Contributors, William Shakespeare, Wyoming Catholic College|

Rome does not occasionally become relevant in our understanding of political upheaval. Rather, it forms part of our very identity as Christians and heirs of the Western tradition that it helped shape. No one saw the essential drama of Rome more clearly than William Shakespeare. In the current issue of Atlantic magazine, editor-at-large Cullen Murphy [...]

Edmund Burke and the Progressive Mind

By Glenn Arbery|2021-03-19T15:14:54-05:00March 19th, 2021|Categories: Edmund Burke, Glenn Arbery, Great Books, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

Not swayed by popular enthusiasm, Edmund Burke was the first substantial thinker to address the full-blown entrance of radical ideas into the political sphere and the first to express a truly conservative umbrage at the imposition of abstractions onto a world of particular, distinctive circumstances. Juniors at Wyoming Catholic College have just read in Humanities [...]

The Pandemic One Year Later

By Glenn Arbery|2021-03-12T10:17:56-06:00March 12th, 2021|Categories: Coronavirus, Glenn Arbery, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

For a long time, I suspect, we will think back on this past year with a sense that it has revealed many things about institutions and individuals. My hope is that, as this rift heals, its deepest effects will be the restoration of our social nature, a new love of liberty, and a renewed gratitude [...]

Where Babies Come From

By Glenn Arbery|2021-02-27T15:17:20-06:00February 27th, 2021|Categories: Abortion, Family, Glenn Arbery, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

We love God, follow the reason implicit in sexual nature, and consider having children the greatest privilege bestowed on us, the greatest of gifts. Each child is a huge promise, a new world aborning, and I cannot imagine a financial anxiety so serious that it would make anyone think otherwise. In one of the customs [...]

A Deeper Lent

By Glenn Arbery|2021-02-19T13:50:09-06:00February 20th, 2021|Categories: Christianity, Glenn Arbery, Lent, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

The season of Lent is superimposed upon the life of work that we already lead, but here, more than ever, the pressing need is for silence, renunciation, and the leisure of deep work in prayer and spiritual reflection, achieved without deadlines or anxiety. Back before the students returned to Wyoming Catholic College this semester, I [...]

The Beauty of Persuasion

By Glenn Arbery|2021-02-12T15:34:20-06:00February 12th, 2021|Categories: Glenn Arbery, Rhetoric, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

Persuasion is not an antiquated art for a lost era. In a time of base language and tweets, social media and the hive mind of the internet, it makes sense to study the principles of oral rhetoric and to understand effective and responsible appeal to an audience. A strange madness descended this week upon Lander, [...]

Why Literature Matters

By Glenn Arbery|2021-02-05T12:12:02-06:00February 5th, 2021|Categories: Education, Glenn Arbery, Great Books, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

Simply speaking, literature works with the mode of thought most natural to the human mind—that is, thinking in images, comparisons, characters, speeches, and actions. Every household of parents and children has a cast of distinct characters whose various performances become stories in the family. Our five-year-old grandson Andrew, for example, though a domestic terrorist by [...]

Shakespeare and “Hateful Rhetoric”

By Glenn Arbery|2021-01-29T15:11:50-06:00January 29th, 2021|Categories: Education, Glenn Arbery, Great Books, Politics, Senior Contributors, William Shakespeare, Wyoming Catholic College|

In the current battle for the classroom between traditional literature and overt propaganda, #DisruptTexts and its allies attack Shakespeare for hate speech. But is Shakespeare promulgating hateful rhetoric? Or is he thinking deeply into the dramatic situation of racial and religious conflict in the Mediterranean world to reveal the human heart in conflict with itself? [...]

Living at This Hour

By Glenn Arbery|2021-01-22T09:54:37-06:00January 22nd, 2021|Categories: Glenn Arbery, Government, John Milton, Literature, Poetry, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

Even without the content of the general historical frame, William Wordsworth’s sonnet, “London 1802,” is moving to every generation that reads it, and it is natural to compare our current political situation with the one described in the poem. All of us, of course, remember the dire circumstances of England in 1802. No? Then we [...]

Furies: The Myopia of the Present Moment

By Glenn Arbery|2021-01-15T16:52:37-06:00January 15th, 2021|Categories: Civilization, Classics, Glenn Arbery, Great Books, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

Turning away from the news and attending with imagination to the “Oresteia” takes faith, both in God and in the wisdom of our forebears. This will be a worthier endeavor, both for the present moment and for the time to come, than trying to tear down the very structures that give us the promise of [...]

Jew and Greek

By Glenn Arbery|2020-12-25T18:28:06-06:00December 23rd, 2020|Categories: Christianity, Christmas, Glenn Arbery, Great Books, Iliad, Odyssey, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

Against the backdrop of angels and gods, Jew and Greek, comes the humble birth in Bethlehem. This most momentous intervention is God’s incarnation. God is the newborn mortal child wholly dependent on others to shelter and nourish him. He is also, at the same time, the ageless and immortal God on Whom all creation depends. [...]

Advent in Uncertain Times

By Glenn Arbery|2020-12-11T13:27:21-06:00December 12th, 2020|Categories: Advent, Christianity, Christmas, Glenn Arbery, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

In these uncertain times, we are constantly being urged to historicize Christ, as though He were merely a symbolic figure in a moribund and culturally discredited system of thought. But Advent reminds us of the deep promise of the Nicene Creed. He was, He is, and He is to come. In this Advent, we await [...]

Sitting Bull and the Wrath of Achilles

By Glenn Arbery|2020-12-04T11:30:40-06:00December 6th, 2020|Categories: American West, Glenn Arbery, History, Senior Contributors, 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 [...]