Christopher Dawson Archives ~ Page 5 of 8 ~ The Imaginative Conservative

Russell Kirk’s Historical Imagination

By Gerald Russello|2016-02-12T15:28:02-06:00February 6th, 2015|Categories: Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Featured, Gerald Russello, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot|

“Our religion, our culture, and our political rights all are maintained by continuity: by the respect for the accomplishments of our forefathers, and by our concern for our posterity’s well-being.”[1] In his private library at Piety Hill, Russell Kirk devoted a large bookcase to the works of those he called “philosophical historians.” Kirk placed on [...]

Christopher Dawson on the Spiritual Disease of the Secular West

By John R. E. Bliese|2019-09-07T13:01:18-05:00October 21st, 2014|Categories: Christendom, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Culture, Featured, Religion, Secularism|Tags: 1MA|

Christopher Henry Dawson has been called “the greatest English-speaking Catholic historian of the twentieth century.“[1] He was also a profound conservative critic of contemporary Western culture and his indictments were based on a synthetic interpretation of the history of mankind which is one of the most impressive ever produced. His analysis of the decline of [...]

The English Spring of Catholicism

By Stratford Caldecott|2016-02-12T15:28:07-06:00September 9th, 2014|Categories: Books, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, G.K. Chesterton|

This is a remarkable, indeed a staggering book. Each of the four sections, on G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, and David Jones, taken alone, would have made it worthwhile. Taken together, they offer an illuminating analysis of the vigorous Catholic revival that took place in Britain during the early and middle years of [...]

The French Revolution & the Writhings of Nihilism

By John Goerke|2022-07-13T18:13:42-05:00August 8th, 2014|Categories: Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Revolution|Tags: John Goerke|

The most searching and dispassionate analysis will yield the irrefutable conclusion that summer is by far the worst season. Both presently and historically, the months when the northern hemisphere faces the full force of the sun are months of turmoil and destruction. Locally, a man will notice his powers suppressed by the sun, his energy [...]

Christopher Dawson: The Historian of the Twentieth Century

By Bradley J. Birzer|2021-05-24T12:21:45-05:00July 31st, 2014|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Catholicism, Christendom, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Culture, Featured|

Ultimately, the Church—as the only historical entity that transcends nationalisms and ideologies—must use its intellectual strength to combat, attenuate, or destroy that which was loosed from the abyss. “It is, therefore, the duty of those elements in Western Society that still possess a principle of spiritual unity to rally the divided forces of our civilization,” [...]

The Early Life and Conversion of Christopher Dawson

By Bradley J. Birzer|2016-02-18T18:24:35-06:00July 24th, 2014|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Featured, History|

On October 12, 1889, Mary Louisa and Henry Philip Dawson gave birth to a son, Henry Christopher. Descended from a long line of Celtic aristocracy, Mr. Dawson was born in a Welsh castle, an immense structure believed in myth to have been built all in a single night. His mother’s family had great standing in [...]

The Gray Eminence of Christopher Dawson

By Bradley J. Birzer|2016-02-18T18:24:35-06:00June 26th, 2014|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Featured|

To put it simply (and perhaps a bit “simplistically”—but I prefer to think of it as putting it “with fervor”), Christopher Dawson was one of the greatest historians of the twentieth century, certainly one of its greatest men of letters, and perhaps one of the most respected Catholic scholars in the English-speaking world. I’ve have [...]

The Case for Bourgeois Oblige

By Dwight Longenecker|2019-02-26T16:39:56-06:00April 25th, 2014|Categories: Catholicism, Charity, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Dwight Longenecker|

My father was a born again businessman. A fervent Evangelical Christian, he owned and operated a chain of six men’s clothing stores in South Carolina. Sometimes his fellow Christians would ask, “Jim don’t you feel a bit guilty making so much profit?” “Not at all!” my Dad would grin, “I want to make as much [...]

Dawson’s Creed: Why Historians Should Rediscover Christopher Dawson

By Dermot Quinn|2016-02-18T18:24:35-06:00August 18th, 2013|Categories: Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Featured, History, Religion|Tags: 1TAC, Dermot Quinn|

Historians come in all different shapes and sizes. The well-known ones, those mass-market storytellers we invite into our homes by way of television or bestseller, display enough variety to suit most tastes. There’s David McCullough, courtly and urbane as a Renaissance bishop; Ken Burns, bearded and earnest in the required PBS manner; Michael Beschloss, bronzed [...]

The Imaginative Conservative: An Apostolate of the Intellect

By Bradley J. Birzer|2016-08-03T10:37:06-05:00June 30th, 2013|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Christendom, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Conservatism, Featured, The Imaginative Conservative|

The Imaginative Conservative Senior Contributors: Cyber Inklings W. Winston Elliott III, founder and grandmaster of The Imaginative Conservative, recently posted a collage of all of the Senior Contributors to The Imaginative Conservative. It’s quite a picture, and it’s more than a bit humbling as well as inspiring. As I was looking at it, [...]

Christianity and the Humanist Tradition

By Christopher Dawson|2021-05-24T14:17:48-05:00June 30th, 2013|Categories: Christendom, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Featured, Western Civilization|

The present age has seen a great slump in humanist values. After dominating Western culture for four centuries humanism today is on the retreat on all fronts, and it seems as though the world is moving in the direction of a non-humanist and even an anti-humanist form of culture. This tendency is most clearly visible [...]

Dawson, Eliot, and the Word

By Bradley J. Birzer|2016-08-03T10:37:08-05:00June 17th, 2013|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Christendom, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Featured, Language, T.S. Eliot|

Christopher Dawson Continuing the theme of language and its importance to the human person, both individually and relationally (see previous essay), let us turn now to Christopher Dawson. The English historian Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), another patron of The Imaginative Conservative, embraced a solidly Aristotelian view of the social world. Aristotle had famously written [...]

Christopher Dawson and Christendom

By Bradley J. Birzer|2022-03-12T11:38:53-06:00June 7th, 2013|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Christendom, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Featured|

Christopher Dawson unceasingly promoted an examination of culture as the most important basis of understanding a society, the family, and the human person. He believed the desire to give primacy to politics led to a loss of imagination in the human person and an impoverishment of higher reasoning in human societies. Although largely ignored in [...]

The Family Crisis & the Future of Western Civilization

By Stephen Baskerville|2022-10-20T12:26:11-05:00June 3rd, 2013|Categories: Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Culture, Homosexual Unions, Marriage, Virtue|Tags: 1HU, Statism, Stephen Baskerville|

We may be on the verge of a wider confrontation that will decide not only the survival of the family but fundamental questions about the scope and nature of the modern state. In April 2009, Dr. James Dobson stepped down as head of the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family with a pessimistic message [...]