Glenn Arbery Archives ~ The Imaginative Conservative

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Approaching Thanks

By Glenn Arbery|2020-12-21T13:40:31-06:00November 25th, 2020|Categories: Glenn Arbery, Great Books, Plato, Senior Contributors, Thanksgiving, 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 [...]

Veterans Day

By Glenn Arbery|2020-12-21T13:39:05-06:00November 10th, 2020|Categories: American Republic, Glenn Arbery, Patriotism, Senior Contributors, 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 [...]

Pilate’s Landslide

By Glenn Arbery|2020-10-31T09:57:50-05:00October 31st, 2020|Categories: Donald Trump, Glenn Arbery, Journalism, Politics, Presidency, Senior Contributors, Truth, Wyoming Catholic College|

Editorializing in news stories, once verboten, has now become de rigueur. Journalism, never perfect at any moment of its history, but full of aspiration to be objective and balanced, has now conceded entirely to Nietzsche’s critique of empiricism: “There are no facts, only interpretations.” Many years ago, in an earlier contentious era of American [...]

The Problem of Eumaios

By Glenn Arbery|2020-10-16T12:09:09-05:00October 24th, 2020|Categories: Glenn Arbery, Great Books, Homer, Odyssey, Senior Contributors, Slavery, Wyoming Catholic College|

Refusing to dwell upon the “subjunctive abyss”—that bottomless, tormenting sense of what has been denied or taken away—Eumaios the swineherd gives his energies to what he can do and do well. He practices virtue on his own with no one else to enforce it and reminds the wandering Odysseus what real nobility is. Whatever [...]

Geography of Being

By Glenn Arbery|2020-10-12T10:40:31-05:00October 17th, 2020|Categories: Classics, Glenn Arbery, Great Books, History, Homer, Odyssey, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

When we study the classics, we might have the atlas open beside the book to remind us where we are and when we live. We can feel the overlays of history and empires and languages that sweep over the same disputed places. Relevant and contemporary to us, the great actions of mind and spirit [...]

Late and Soon

By Glenn Arbery|2020-10-10T17:04:07-05:00October 10th, 2020|Categories: Glenn Arbery, Leisure, Nature, Poetry, Senior Contributors, Time, Wyoming Catholic College|

The pervasive “world” is a man-made complex of ambitions and obligations, a dense social and cultural and financial web that captures us and estranges our experience from the primal realities of earth and sky. We need to remind ourselves of the blessedness that can come even in the midst of the busiest days, that [...]

Core Exercises and the Election

By Glenn Arbery|2020-11-02T15:50:41-06:00September 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. [...]