Glenn Arbery Archives ~ Page 10 of 15 ~ The Imaginative Conservative

Online Learning, the Current Crisis, & Reading Alone

By Glenn Arbery|2020-04-17T17:55:31-05:00April 17th, 2020|Categories: Books, Culture, Education, Glenn Arbery, Liberal Learning, Senior Contributors, Writing, Wyoming Catholic College|

Our college, like most others, has adopted the new mode of “distance learning” during the current crisis. What if our students begin to learn a new kind of engagement with the written word precisely because of this momentary break from the habits of life at school and of absence from each other? I can’t help [...]

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 of [...]

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 or [...]

The Deep Power of Joy

By Glenn Arbery|2021-04-06T14:15:43-05:00March 7th, 2020|Categories: Culture, Education, Glenn Arbery, Nature, Poetry, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

William Wordsworth’s introspection in “Tintern Abbey” leads him to attempt to answer the question we ask with our curriculum at our college: How does the experience of unforgettable natural beauty in the full vitality of youth affect the moral and spiritual life that follows? As all the world should know, the curriculum at Wyoming Catholic [...]

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 I’m [...]

Why the Young Shouldn’t Turn Their Backs on Politics

By Glenn Arbery|2020-06-11T13:29:53-05:00February 1st, 2020|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Conservatism, Glenn Arbery, Modernity, Politics, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

Forming good manners and helping to make our country beautiful—not cynically undercutting our institutions—is part of the task of education. Our students must know that we can never concede the fight to those who would plunge our institutions into the abyss of ideological slavery, and who wish to undercut the understanding of shared responsibility and [...]

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 a [...]

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 in [...]

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 doing [...]

Energies of Hope

By Glenn Arbery|2020-11-13T03:47:31-06:00November 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 I [...]

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 London [...]

Europe Without Europe

By Glenn Arbery|2021-10-23T21:41:20-05:00October 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 one. [...]

Traditional Education & the Future of Europe

By Glenn Arbery|2019-10-02T15:25:41-05:00October 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 in [...]