Glenn Arbery Archives ~ The Imaginative Conservative

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|2019-11-01T02:02:58-06:00October 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|2019-10-26T21:55:19-06:00October 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|2019-10-11T12:43:13-06:00October 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 [...]

Traditional Education & the Future of Europe

By Glenn Arbery|2019-10-02T15:25:41-06:00October 2nd, 2019|Categories: Classical Education, Conservatism, Europe, Glenn Arbery, Liberal Arts, Senior Contributors, Western Tradition, Wyoming Catholic College|

Near the end of his recent book, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition (highly recommended), the English philosopher Roger Scruton makes a very interesting observation about what is possible in America but not in Europe. As he puts it, the burden of American conservatism has been to define the customs and traditions most [...]

Education With Range

By Glenn Arbery|2019-09-11T10:14:15-06:00September 11th, 2019|Categories: Classical Education, Glenn Arbery, Liberal Arts, Liberal Learning, Senior Contributors, Western Civilization, Wyoming Catholic College|

Liberal arts students are “generalists in a specialized world,” and as a result, they bring many analogies to bear on the problems that they will face on a daily basis in the world of work. And those analogies come from what they actually study, from Homer to field science to statistical analysis to metaphysics. Back [...]

Legalizing the Resurrection

By Glenn Arbery|2019-09-09T11:52:05-06:00August 30th, 2019|Categories: Conservatism, Glenn Arbery, Modernity, Religion, Senior Contributors, 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. When I went into [...]

Land of Hope

By Glenn Arbery|2019-07-04T12:03:21-06:00July 4th, 2019|Categories: American Republic, Freedom, Glenn Arbery, Hope, Independence Day, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

It’s always important to remember that the Founders of our country did not predicate their arguments for independence on some idea of liberty as the release from all constraints of law or qualms of conscience, but on real, reasoned understandings of the duties that come with freedom and the gratitude that binds us to [...]

True Fourth

By Glenn Arbery|2019-11-28T22:32:32-06:00July 3rd, 2019|Categories: American Founding, Freedom, Glenn Arbery, Independence Day, Liberty, Patriotism, Wyoming Catholic College|

Why is the true Fourth such a powerful image of liberty? Because the things that most deepen us and rouse us are dangerous. An appetite for the real good means being willing to face danger, and the whole point of the liberty we celebrate is that we learn to handle danger, to face it [...]

Summer Reading Recommendations

By Glenn Arbery|2019-06-17T17:47:48-06:00June 17th, 2019|Categories: Books, Glenn Arbery, Literature, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

A sentence from the first paragraph of Federalist 1 occurs to me on the oddest occasions: “But this is a thing more ardently to be wished than seriously to be expected.” In its original context, Alexander Hamilton, writing under a pseudonym, explains how unlikely it would be if everyone engaged in forming the new [...]

Big Brother’s Birthday: Orwell’s “1984” at 70

By Glenn Arbery|2019-06-14T12:34:02-06:00June 7th, 2019|Categories: Books, Culture, George Orwell, Glenn Arbery, Literature, Wyoming Catholic College|

Big Brother needs to subordinate history—that is, what actually happened—to the political desire of the moment, so much so that we no longer even expect objective news; in fact, we doubt the very possibility of it. When George Orwell’s 1984 first appeared in print seventy years ago, no one could have predicted its enormous influence. It [...]