Edmund Burke: The First Conservative, by Jesse Norman In Edmund Burke: The First Conservative, Jesse Norman, a British Conservative party MP and doctoral graduate in philosophy, lays out a bold and engaging case for his subject as “one of the seminal thinkers of the present age”. Owing in part, no doubt, to the author’s profile in [...]
M.E. Bradford was was truly one of the giants of the postwar conservative intellectual movement. A Southerner first, he was naturally both an agrarian and a conservative. The late M.E. (“Mel”) Bradford (1934-1993) was truly one of the giants of the postwar conservative intellectual movement. A Texan (born in Fort Worth), Bradford earned his B.A. [...]
In his politics and in his works, Burke spoke for the concept of the nation, and nowhere is this more apparent than in his Reflections on the Revolution in France[1] And rarely have his views been more relevant than in present-day America. Fortunately, Americans have never been subjected to a revolution as terrible as that of the [...]
The Imaginative Conservative is pleased to welcome our newest Senior Contributor, Dr. Bradley G. Green. Bradley G. Green is Associate Professor of Christian Thought and Tradition at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. He is the co-founder of Augustine School, a classical and Christian school in Jackson, Tennessee, where he served as Head of School. [...]
Shelby Tankersley by W. Winston Elliott III The Imaginative Conservative is pleased to announce Shelby Tankersley has joined our staff as Assistant Editor. Ms. Tankersley is a recent graduate from the Honors College of Houston Baptist University, where she studied Philosophy and Government. Her experience includes writing for the Intercollegiate Review, completing the Intercollegiate Studies Institute [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Winston Elliott III (This text is a revised presentation of an address given to the Annual Conference of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters held June 7-9, 2013 in Baltimore, MD.) The Imaginative Conservative is an online journal for those who seek the True, the Good and the Beautiful. We address culture, liberal learning, [...]
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 [...]
Edmund Burke The awful Author of our being is the Author of our place in the order of existence,—and…having disposed and marshalled us by a divine tactic, not according to our will, but according to His, He has in and by that disposition virtually subjected us to act the part which belongs to [...]
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 [...]
Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind”, remains a kind of liberation, an intellectually adventurous work written with a kind of boldness and even recklessness rarely to be found in today’s more politically correct and cramped age. But it rejected conservative impulses. One crisp morning 26 years ago I was walking across the campus [...]
Our friends at Justin Press have recently published two wonderful books especially appealing to those of us who share their admiration of the brilliant English historian Christopher Dawson. The Annotated Quotable Dawson Christopher Dawson, the greatest Catholic historian of the twentieth century, remains the final authority on the relation between religion and culture and is [...]