By and large the educated elites in the Western world today are without religious belief and often animated by a “culture of repudiation,” keen to banish old ideas of the sacred from public life and to remake the institutions and structures of civil society so as to reflect their own liberated lifestyle. In America and [...]
Although Pythagorean mathematics bears little resemblance to what we find in today’s textbooks, its foundation was laid by ancient lovers of wisdom. By rediscovering its original significance, mathematics might guide our minds not toward engineering aimed at mastering nature, but toward contemplation, preparing us for deeper contact with the realm of spirit and its magnificent, [...]
Our search for truth in this earthly life is not a march to the grave, but a journey of progressive illumination, in which each day brings the promise of some new wonder, some fresh joy. “Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will [...]
The answers to the errors of modern times need to be given in philosophy and theology, but it is essential that we also experience the truth imaginatively. Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. —Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” These famous lines of Keats [...]
Our cultural confusions, especially among the educated, reveal a language desperately in need of repair, a reality in need of rediscovery. Differences in rank, in particular, were obvious until the dawn of modern scientism, the political ideology of technocratic materialism. An extremely liberal, atheist British comedian came out in support of Britain’s new free speech [...]
Could a fifty-year-old, small book on grammar, speech, and rhetoric by a nearly-forgotten thinker have the power to revolutionize and re-awaken our decadent intellectual life? Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973) might not recognize, in 2018, the America to which he came in 1933, seeking refuge from a Germany that had just elected Hitler. [...]
Literature is so effective in giving us a foundational understanding of ourselves, our neighbours, and our shared human existence throughout history because it shows us the way of virtue, the truth of reason, and the beauty of the cosmos and our place within it. Jared Zimmerer interviews Joseph Pearce. Jared Zimmerer: Throughout your collection of [...]
Like Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, conservatives must come up from politics and recognize that the roots of a truer just order are watered with the permanent ideals of truth, goodness, and beauty. The insights of the arts of life are vital to make life worth living. Readers of The Imaginative Conservative know well the phrase “beauty [...]
The civilization birthed by Israel, Greece, and Rome is the source of culture and individual traditions that can nourish us—traditions that can give us purpose, order, and beauty and rescue us from despair, boredom, and banality. Follow it and live by it, even if others scorn and abandon it. After all, it made us who [...]
The everyday conversation of a free society depends on trust in our commonsense experience of reality. Contemporary errors about the True, Good, and Beautiful are not simply mistaken explanations. They are lies, distorting and misrepresenting the experiences themselves, and cannot explain our real experience of Transcendence. Many parents are discovering that there is something seriously [...]
What’s needed at this juncture in our cultural evolution is a rebirth of healthy modesty about human being and human fate, a realization that we are imperfect and imperfectible, particular and embodied, with all our warts and blemishes, but for that very reason valuable beyond measure. Infinitude is an appealing concept to many, not mathematically, [...]
In the transcendence of God, the truth is not a collection of dispiriting facts about our meaningless emergence from chance combinations of matter, but justice and mercy and ultimate harmony. Our approach ought to be to reveal Who God is, not to close off the way to Him. At last week’s meeting of the Philadelphia [...]
The idea of joy is to me inseparable from the idea of culture. Joy in truth gives rise to culture—human accomplishment and creativity in all its wealth and richness—and culture in turn gives us joy again, the impetus to go on living. A self-dedication to culture in its fullest sense, and to discovering truth and [...]
In a moment when the forces of ideology seem to threaten to overwhelm the voice of sanity and civility, Eva Brann’s imaginative conservatism offers another way—a way rooted in, as she has put it, “talking, reading, writing, listening.” Editor’s Note: This essay is part of a series dedicated to Senior Contributor Dr. Eva Brann of St. [...]