Glenn Arbery Archives ~ The Imaginative Conservative

The Poet and the Universe of Thought

By Glenn Arbery|2024-04-08T13:47:47-05:00April 8th, 2024|Categories: Christianity, Glenn Arbery, Great Books, Literature, Poetry, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, 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 daily [...]

Wrath and Mercy

By Glenn Arbery|2024-04-02T16:39:44-05:00April 2nd, 2024|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Glenn Arbery, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

There’s something personal and unforgettable in the anger of someone who passionately protects the good. Good wrath is profoundly instructive. We hope in God’s mercy, yet we are mindful of His justice, which is not presented to us as dispassionate correction. My wife and I had a mentor, a wise man and forceful leader, who [...]

Legalizing the Resurrection

By Glenn Arbery|2024-03-31T16:09:39-05:00March 31st, 2024|Categories: Conservatism, Easter, 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 the [...]

God’s Truth

By Glenn Arbery|2024-02-24T21:37:57-06:00February 24th, 2024|Categories: Christianity, Classical Education, Glenn Arbery, Liberal Learning, Timeless Essays, Truth, Wyoming Catholic College|

In the transcendence of God, the truth is not a collection of dispiriting facts about our meaningless emergence from chance combinations of matter, but justice and mercy and ultimate harmony. Our approach ought to be to reveal Who God is, not to close off the way to Him. At last week’s meeting of the Philadelphia [...]

Remembering Jack

By Glenn Arbery|2024-01-28T20:33:30-06:00January 28th, 2024|Categories: Catholicism, Death, Glenn Arbery, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

My friend John O'Connell was a conservative of the truest stamp, never miseducated, never subject to the whims and fashions of opinion. A man of dignified piety, his principles were strong and unshakable. I have had occasion many times to say that Jack was the best man I knew, and I do not want his [...]

The Coming of the Lord

By Glenn Arbery|2023-12-12T20:45:03-06:00December 12th, 2023|Categories: Advent, Christianity, Christmas, Culture, Glenn Arbery, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, 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 of [...]

Advent and Melancholy

By Glenn Arbery|2023-12-02T20:54:45-06:00December 2nd, 2023|Categories: Advent, Catholicism, Christianity, Christmas, Glenn Arbery, Great Books, Liberal Arts, Liberal Learning, Timeless Essays, Wyoming Catholic College|

Nothing breaks through melancholy like a baby. During Advent, we wait for that moment of absolute newness that we need within but cannot muster, that moment when the whole of the divine nature, the whole meaning of universes beyond number, lies helpless before us. On Monday of this week, students met with me in the new [...]

Poetry & Politics?

By Glenn Arbery|2023-10-25T05:58:29-05:00October 24th, 2023|Categories: Dante, Featured, Glenn Arbery, Humanities, Liberal Arts, Poetry, Timeless Essays, William Shakespeare, Wyoming Catholic College|

Great poetry can come from deep engagement with the problems of politics, but it is especially moving to see how exile—often the consequence of that engagement—subtly becomes the symbol of the condition of fallen man. Students at Wyoming Catholic College memorize many poems in the four years of the humanities curriculum, but few of the [...]

Why We Teach

By Glenn Arbery|2023-09-30T16:00:17-05:00September 30th, 2023|Categories: Education, Glenn Arbery, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

Our college exists to combat nihilism by opening our students to the integral wisdom of the past—the great tradition—and to the truth of nature directly experienced. We are firmly centered in God, not in the abstract, but in the real world, in what He has revealed about His action in human time, and more specifically [...]

Do Great Books Make Us Better?

By Glenn Arbery|2023-09-20T18:02:08-05:00September 20th, 2023|Categories: Glenn Arbery, Great Books, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, Wyoming Catholic College|

If books could make us better on their own, then we could read our way to perfect virtue. Do Great Books make us better? This question goes to the heart of what we do at Wyoming Catholic College. In an essay for The New Yorker early in December, the professor and writer Louis Menand reviews [...]

Intending the Unintended

By Glenn Arbery|2023-09-13T19:06:58-05:00September 13th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Glenn Arbery, Humanities, Liberal Arts, Liberal Learning, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, Wyoming Catholic College|

What is the intention of a Great Books education? Does it need to make the student feel at every moment as though there were a palpable design upon him? I ask because making things “intentional” seems to have become something of a buzzword, even in spiritual matters. Guided tours can be a wonderful thing. I [...]

Silence: Seeing & Hearing God’s World

By Glenn Arbery|2023-08-22T19:06:30-05:00August 22nd, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Glenn Arbery, Poetry, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, Wyoming Catholic College|

Real silence (always recommended by the saints) allows us to escape our own conceptual frames and be open to the world as it is in God's first book. The world repeats itself, as it has done and will do, a little differently each time, each time worth seeing and hearing differently. Several years ago, in [...]

The Grace of Simple Praise

By Glenn Arbery|2023-07-28T12:39:49-05:00July 28th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Glenn Arbery, Liberal Learning, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

Learning the language of Christian culture begins with God-given reality, which explains our emphasis on the outdoors and on horsemanship; it explains our technology policy, which helps students avoid an algorithmically manipulative virtual reality; and it explains our four years of classes centered on the Great Books, an encounter with the greatest thought of the [...]

Unfinished Reading

By Glenn Arbery|2023-07-07T15:35:21-05:00July 7th, 2023|Categories: Books, Catholicism, Glenn Arbery, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

Every summer, I look forward to reading new books in the months between classes, but this year I'm determined to finish the ones I've started. The word "graduation" in most people's minds means something like "the end of an education," even though the word "commencement" (used for this ceremony at least since 1387, according to the Oxford [...]