Long ago, The Nation had a conservative editor. Paul Elmer More edited the already venerable magazine for five years just before the First World War. On joining The Nation, More was already an entrenched conservative; indeed, he preferred the term “reactionary.” While at the magazine, he wrote 600 articles. At his departure, he was well [...]
“History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon by the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetite.” —Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France […]
Some day I shall write a book with the title The Age of Eliot. The span of Mr. T. S. Eliot’s life, extending from the ascendancy of President Cleveland and Lord Salisbury to our present troubled hour, has been characterized by as much material change as any age in the whole of history; and this [...]
How did Americans lose the culture war against same-sex marriage? What caused the tide to turn against us? Did we lose sight of our Western heritage and let education disintegrate, as Christopher Dawson warned? Given the latest battle Catholics have lost in America’s Culture War, I asked myself, how did we get into this mess? [...]
When Christopher Dawson passed away in the late spring of 1970, he did so not only as one of the most important Catholic thinkers of his century, but he also did so as a loyal citizen of the City of God, having always resisted the myriad of temptations of this City of Man. As noted [...]
No intellectual task could be more urgent today than refuting the pseudo-scientific distinction between ”facts” and “values” and restoring to the humanities and social sciences a sense of transcendent moral purpose.[1] In this effort we would be well-advised to reconsider the work of a great American whose ideas have yet to be fully comprehended and [...]
To suggest that Christopher Dawson was one of the greatest Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century is a rather easy thing both to affirm and confirm. His influence on T.S. Eliot, Etienne Gilson, Russell Kirk, David Jones, Eric Gill, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Thomas Merton, Sister Madeleva Wolff, Jacques Maritain, Bernard Wall, Tom Burns, Frank and [...]
Winston Elliott III & Brad Birzer For those of you who do not know, Winston Elliott is the mastermind behind this whole venture, The Imaginative Conservative. I first met Winston twenty summers ago—at a conference he sponsored in Houston, summer 1995. I was still in graduate school at the time, living in Bloomington, Indiana. [...]
Today we celebrate the five-year anniversary of The Imaginative Conservative. While it is true that we first published on July 10, 2010, the seeds of our efforts were planted much earlier. Friendships of decades, books inherited from the past, and lives spent in pursuit of eternal truths are the foundations of The Imaginative Conservative community. Among our writers many share friendships which help us to [...]
On this, the fifth anniversary of The Imaginative Conservative, it is fitting for us to unveil our new seal, one which exemplifies the mission of The Imaginative Conservative. We have created an image in which every element serves a purpose—one that not only encompasses our mission, but which is also original and instantly recognizable. In this [...]
What Matthew Arnold called “an epoch of concentration” seems to be impending over the English-speaking world. The revolutionary impulses and the social enthusiasms which have dominated this era since their great explosion in Russia are now confronted with a countervailing physical and intellectual force. Communism, Fascism, and their kindred expansive ideologies all in their fashion [...]
A man is not primarily a witness against something. That is only incidental to the fact that he is a witness for something. —Whittaker Chambers, Witness In recent years, conservatives have fallen into a thoroughly oppositional mind-set in American politics. We have had good reasons for doing so. The agenda of the Obama administration has [...]
T.S. Eliot One hundred years ago, Thomas Steams Eliot was born into an intelligently conservative family in St. Louis. His grandfather, a Unitarian minister and a man of mark, founded the Church of the Messiah and Washington University; the Eliots of St. Louis were Republican reformers, active in good causes, pillars of order. [...]
He was among the brightest students I have taught. We had just finished talking about how and why Freudian or Marxists interpretations of reality are suffocating in their reductionistic interpretations. The conversation moved to the writings of Christopher Dawson that are happily being reprinted by Catholic University Press of America. As our discussion meandered, he [...]