Glenn Arbery Archives ~ Page 6 of 15 ~ The Imaginative Conservative

Straight Lines and Circles

By Glenn Arbery|2022-06-03T11:56:57-05:00June 3rd, 2022|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Glenn Arbery, Liberal Learning, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

Commencements always make us sentimental, but somehow this unexpected convergence of the meandering of a river and the perfection of the circle struck home to me almost as an allegory for our graduates. Last week, the 37 graduates of the Class of 2022 at Wyoming Catholic College walked across the stage at the Lander Community [...]

The World as Unreal

By Glenn Arbery|2022-06-02T10:33:18-05:00May 13th, 2022|Categories: Catholicism, Culture War, Glenn Arbery, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

Who would have thought that Mother's Day would bring us the spectacle of churches attacked and Supreme Court Justices sought out at home to be demonstrated against and vilified for their reasonable beliefs? Indeed, many things in the contemporary world seem hard to believe. The idea that everything we experience could be an elaborate deception goes [...]

On “Book Reading”

By Glenn Arbery|2022-04-29T16:00:49-05:00April 29th, 2022|Categories: Books, Glenn Arbery, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

Reading books is already a niche activity. Our lives are not so much interrupted by as constituted of distractions. Sitting down to read a book requires elbowing everybody and everything aside. Last week, Mark Bauerlein of First Things wrote a witty invective against the National Council of Teachers of English for their most recent posturing—a [...]

‘A Breeze Bringing Health’

By Glenn Arbery|2022-04-22T11:43:43-05:00April 22nd, 2022|Categories: Glenn Arbery, Great Books, Plato, Senior Contributors, Socrates, Wyoming Catholic College|

For Socrates, the best city will “track down the nature of what is fine and graceful, so that the young, dwelling as it were in a healthy place, will be benefited by everything. And from that place something of the fine works will strike their vision or their hearing, like a breeze bringing health from [...]

Rest and Resurrection

By Glenn Arbery|2023-04-08T17:36:47-05:00April 15th, 2022|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Easter, Glenn Arbery, Lent, Wyoming Catholic College|

Holy Week is a week of paradoxes: the greatest evil and the greatest good occupy the same deed, the same space on the Cross, the same tomb. At Wyoming Catholic College, the phenomenon known elsewhere as “spring break,” which sounds more or less restful, comprises an important part of our outdoor curriculum. Most students go [...]

Awake to the Past

By Glenn Arbery|2022-04-11T20:15:47-05:00April 11th, 2022|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Glenn Arbery, History, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

These last days of Lent might be a good time to remember those who have come before us in our families, those who begot us and those who begot them, and so on backward into that past where every one of our ancestors used the pronoun “I” just as we do in this living moment. [...]

A Taste for Freedom

By Glenn Arbery|2022-04-02T23:41:31-05:00April 1st, 2022|Categories: Catholicism, Freedom, Glenn Arbery, Ukraine, Wyoming Catholic College|

Citizens are free when they see and respect their dependence on each other. They can best continue to do what they know to be the right thing if they are committed to political self-rule. Ukraine’s spirited defense of itself is a shining example of this kind of freedom. Ukrainian defiance has shaken many people across [...]

Free Time

By Glenn Arbery|2022-03-20T14:19:18-05:00March 20th, 2022|Categories: Christianity, Glenn Arbery, Wyoming Catholic College|

Those of us in the contemporary world imagine that we are too busy to indulge in free time. Leisure and contemplation might have worked in past ages with their sleepy, bucolic landscapes and colorful peasants, but it won’t work in ours. But God commanded us, “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy,” almost as [...]

Special Effects: “The Chosen”

By Glenn Arbery|2022-03-12T09:16:01-06:00March 12th, 2022|Categories: Christianity, Film, Glenn Arbery, Senior Contributors|

"The Chosen" addresses and transfigures the duality we love in our popular mythology: a man who is also God. Repeatedly, it raises questions about how we imagine the humanity of Jesus. What was it like when Peter and Andrew pulled in that massive haul of fish after catching nothing all night? How do you picture [...]

Tyranny and Humane Understanding

By Glenn Arbery|2022-03-18T14:07:56-05:00March 4th, 2022|Categories: Classical Education, Classical Learning, Glenn Arbery, Liberal Learning, Senior Contributors, Wyoming Catholic College|

In this time of renewed world strife, it might seem counter-intuitive or even irresponsible to argue that, more than ever, we need genuine old-fashioned liberal education whose ends are wisdom and virtue. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine last week stunned the world, but perhaps what ought to be truly stunning is that almost everyone, across [...]

Conscience and Convenience

By Glenn Arbery|2022-02-24T13:47:45-06:00February 25th, 2022|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Glenn Arbery, Sainthood, Senior Contributors|

The great past instructs the contemporary conscience. Obviously, playwright Robert Bolt was aware of the persecutions going on in fascist and communist regimes, and his Thomas More sees into the 20th century future and its need for martyrs. His More also anticipates the “wokeism” of the 21st century when the thoughts of our hearts increasingly [...]

Transition and Tradition

By Glenn Arbery|2022-02-17T13:07:13-06:00February 18th, 2022|Categories: Christianity, Glenn Arbery, Senior Contributors, Western Civilization, Western Tradition|

Belief in the objective existence of the world outside ourselves, the world to which we submit our thought, is our deepest inheritance. Last Thursday, Bishop Steven Biegler of the Diocese of Cheyenne came to Wyoming Catholic College to bless our new Immaculate Conception Oratory—“new,” at least, in our use of it. As I have mentioned [...]

Truthfulness Is Not Optional

By Glenn Arbery|2022-02-12T14:07:18-06:00February 12th, 2022|Categories: Glenn Arbery, Wyoming Catholic College|

In a time when crime and inflation are rising together, when independent nations are threatened by massive powers eager to consume them, and when dispassionate public discourse seems impossible, it's bracing to remember the fairness and generosity that make justice and good judgment possible. In the last few months, two friends have highly recommended a [...]

The Mantle of Eumaios

By Glenn Arbery|2022-02-08T09:44:00-06:00February 8th, 2022|Categories: Glenn Arbery, Great Books, Homer, Odyssey, Senior Contributors|

Why is it, we might ask, that the "Odyssey" ultimately feels so consonant with the Old Testament in its depiction of the punishments of sensuality and perfidy, and so profoundly pre-Christian in its elevation of simple, hidden people into rewards they could never have expected? At the risk of undercutting my ethos, I want to [...]