Glenn Arbery Archives ~ The Imaginative Conservative

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 [...]

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 [...]

A Question of Politics

By Glenn Arbery|2020-02-01T22:00:19-06:00February 1st, 2020|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Conservatism, Glenn Arbery, Modernity, Politics, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

An interesting thing—somewhat alarming, always surprising—happens at Wyoming Catholic College and probably at other small, strongly Catholic colleges like ours. A number of students express dislike, even disdain, for politics. We have noticed it for years. They don’t see what contemporary events have to do with real education. […]

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 [...]

Memory and Its Discontents

By Glenn Arbery|2019-11-26T21:54:21-06:00November 24th, 2019|Categories: Classical Education, Education, Glenn Arbery, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

The whole thrust of the modern world is toward a slighting of memory. These days, most of us worry more about how much memory our computers have than about developing this profound faculty in ourselves. At Wyoming Catholic College, our students continue a practice of great antiquity—they memorize poetry. Although people have never stopped [...]

Energies of Hope

By Glenn Arbery|2019-11-06T15:29:05-06:00November 14th, 2019|Categories: Glenn Arbery, Literature, Wyoming Catholic College|

I love the idea of the energy of hope. What we want to see in students is the presence of some inner drive, some fire of ambition toward a worthy end. This end needs to be good, in the future, difficult to achieve, and possible. Without hope, the soul goes flat and sour. In his [...]

Heroes of the Fourth Turning

By Glenn Arbery|2019-11-09T22:14:08-06:00November 9th, 2019|Categories: Catholicism, Culture, Glenn Arbery, Senior Contributors, Worldview, Wyoming Catholic College|

Will Arbery’s “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” is intelligently written, beautifully directed, well-acted, and gripping from the very first scenes. Certainly, it’s a play that demands extended conversation. When I told my wife that I was going to be writing this week about our son Will’s play, Heroes of the Fourth Turning, she asked me if [...]

John Henry Newman: Conscience of the Age

By Glenn Arbery|2019-11-01T02:02:58-05:00October 31st, 2019|Categories: Catholicism, Glenn Arbery, Imagination, Moral Imagination, Senior Contributors, St. John Henry Newman, 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. The canonization of John Henry Newman was momentous for [...]

Brexit and Evensong

By Glenn Arbery|2019-10-26T21:55:19-05:00October 26th, 2019|Categories: Conservatism, England, Europe, Glenn Arbery, Politics, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

While in London, my wife and I went to evensong at Westminster Abbey. Throughout the trip, evensong somehow gave us the symbol—high, formal, and beautiful—of the end of the day, both of British greatness and the vitality of Europe. After the Vanenburg Conference at Oxford earlier this month, my wife and I went to [...]

Europe Without Europe

By Glenn Arbery|2019-10-11T12:43:13-05:00October 9th, 2019|Categories: Classical Education, Education, Europe, Glenn Arbery, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

Europe would not be Europe without the current of tradition once inculcated by classical education. It is such an education we must seek to preserve. Though its immediate effects are not manifest, without it the culture would be ceded to those who wish to shape it for a radically secular agenda, perhaps even a posthuman [...]