It is a fact of history that the prisoner’s progress and the pilgrim’s progress can be synonymous. We think perhaps of the witness of famous prisoners, such as Boethius or Solzhenitsyn. The former wrote The Consolation of Philosophy while imprisoned and awaiting execution, bequeathing one of the classics of Christendom to future generations. His final [...]
Friedrich Nietzche’s “Ecce Homo” lays waste to centuries of an ethic of inhibition and restraint. Intellectually brutalized, bloodied, and tortured, the nineteenth-century philosopher presented himself in his final and last words to a world he wanted to overthrow. Behold the man. To be more accurate, behold the demon. In his mockingly titled autobiography and final [...]
The West is split by a new cosmology or religion, pitting a faith in Divine Retribution against a founding faith in Divine Redemption, those who trust a Providential Creation versus those who evangelize a Universal Catastrophe. We’re now embroiled in a culture war, yet the insurgents’ purpose and origin remain obscure. A random collection of [...]
For Harold Bloom, our intellectual strength, the strength of Western civilization, consists in the canon: “Without the Canon we cease to think.” Reading canonical literature serves the individual exclusively: “It enables one to know and endure oneself as a human being.” In the introduction to his controversial masterpiece The Western Canon: The Books and School [...]
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 [...]
When it comes to the American family, the day is late, and the damage done has been great. In urging men and women to forge strong families, author Brad Wilcox is fighting what amounts to a rear-guard action, but he believes that this is the only way to save civilization. Get Married: Why Americans Must [...]
This year has seen the passing of three Good Men who lived to be Old Men in the best and fullest sense: Stan Mattson, Fr. Ian Boyd, and James Patrick. Heroes of the Old West, we salute thee! There are two types of heroism. There is the heroism of Achilles and there is the heroism [...]
If the "Vita Nuova" had been the only major work Dante had made, this work alone would have earned him the reputation as a great poet of Western Civilization. It is well-known that Dante is one of the greatest poets in Western Civilization. His magnum opus, The Divine Comedy, is considered one of the crowning [...]
Since the Renaissance, Christopher Dawson feared, Western culture and society had embraced an arrogant form of humanism, one that places too much emphasis on the goodness of the human person. With the loss of the Medieval beliefs in the Economy of Grace and the Great Chain of Being, culture had adopted two radically dangerous institutions: [...]
Instead of considering contemporary political issues, or politicians, Roger Scruton attempts to rebuild conservatism by looking seriously at its past. Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition, by Roger Scruton (176 pages, All Points Books, 2018) In his Conservatism, An Introduction to the Great Tradition (2017), long-time Anglo-American conservative champion and author Sir Roger Scruton says [...]
When Winston Elliott created The Imaginative Conservative, he did so with the mission of addressing things that matter across time and for all of humanity—not just the political and economic problems and follies of the moment. In this, Winston wisely followed one of Russell Kirk’s most important ideas—that culture, theology, and literature count far more [...]
Was the fall of Rome suicide or murder? Did the Germanic tribes walk over a corpse or did they contribute to its demise? I. Continuing for more than 200 years, from approximately 27 B.C. to A.D. 180, the Pax Romana was among the most stable, prosperous, and peaceful periods in history—certainly in the history of [...]
Christopher Dawson held that the Christian religion created a distinctive culture that not only preceded, but has continued long after, the thirteenth century. It is only by examining this cultural dynamism that one can appreciate why modern society is a mutilated, or a “secularized,” version of Christendom. Soren Kierkegaard observed that a distinguishing mark of [...]
Robert Nisbet feared that modern totalitarians had succeeded in undermining the very foundations of goodness, truth, and morality. They had not only redefined liberty as power, but they had transformed the modern political state into a secular church, exchanging real religion for civic religion, creating a “New Leviathan.” Like most Americans during the Great Depression, [...]