Once upon a time there was a beautiful land that called itself the Shire. Its people were happy. They lived and worked on their own small pieces of land, growing their own food and trading the surplus with their neighbours. Many of them were also craftsmen, making and fixing things so that everyone could [...]
The mantra of the globalists has always been that nations are bad and that the “global community” is good. And then the coronavirus reared its ugly head. There are few things worse than pride and prejudice, the arrogance of the former resulting in the ignorance of the latter. And there are few people more [...]
Pocket Book of Poetry, by Various (128 pages, Barnes & Noble, 2014) I have long advocated that poetry is important. I would argue, in fact, that it is not merely important but necessary. The presence or absence of poetry serves as a barometer for measuring the health of a culture. A culture which has [...]
Only the works published during J.R.R. Tolkien’s lifetime should be considered canonical, whereas the unfinished works collected, collated, and edited by Christopher Tolkien should be considered extra-canonical. I would even venture to suggest that Christopher Tolkien’s work should be considered as footnotes to his father’s corpus and not an extension of it. In the [...]
Though they should be on the same side in their opposition to globalism, Russia and Poland have recently entered into an unholy spat over the history of World War II. The Russian Ambassador to Poland stated recently in an interview with the Russian news site rbc.ru that relations between Russia and Poland are “the [...]
England is even further from the Faith that forged her today than she was fifty years ago. She has forgotten her roots, or, if she hasn’t, she would like to forget. The problem is that the absence of Christ means the absence of goodness, truth, and beauty. A nation that rejects Christ is committing [...]
The belief that wars can be fought to defend democracy or to make the world safe from tyranny retains its potency and still has political mileage. It is indeed a large part of the rationale for the neoconservative worldview. Nonetheless, it is worthy of serious consideration. The tragedy of war is that it is [...]
The Imaginative Conservative’s Senior Contributor Joseph Pearce recently answered questions from students at Benedictine College about his career as a writer and scholar. […]
Can “free trade,” as understood by Adam Smith, bring peace among nations? Or does it just allow the strongest nations to become imperial powers? In answering these questions, we must keep in mind that Smith was an economist and not a prophet. In all normal civilisations the trader existed and must exist. But in [...]
The sheer power and magnitude of Richard Wagner’s “Parsifal,” the fruit of his recent conversion to a vague form of Christianity, shook the resolve and philosophy of his long-time disciple, Friedrich Nietzsche, to their foundations. Having recently watched a superb and breathtaking performance of Wagner’s last and perhaps greatest work, I feel constrained to [...]
As this year marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Beethoven, I’ve been inspired to muse upon his oeuvre and to ask myself which of his many works could be considered the best. It is, however, necessary to say upfront that there are two kinds of “best.” There is the objective “best” and the [...]
T.S. Eliot’s correspondence with Emily Hale was recently opened, having been kept in Princeton archives until fifty years after Miss Hale’s death. Also opened was Eliot’s response to the archives. It seemed that the poet’s ghost had returned for one last lover’s quarrel with the ghost of his first love, over a century after [...]
Since nations are first and foremost cultural realities, the long-term viability and sustainability of nation states depends on the existence of healthy and living national cultures. If the culture withers and decays, the nation state will wither and decay in the culture’s wake. There are good practical and pragmatic political reasons for retaining the presence [...]
In mid-December, I had the pleasure and honour of taking part in a public debate in Hungary on Christian Democracy and its role in contemporary European politics. I was one of a panel of five “experts,” which included a German, a Pole, a Hungarian, and, last but not least, a fellow Englishman, Theodore Dalrymple, [...]