With its lyrical violin solo voice—at once soaring and nostalgic—"The Lark Ascending” offers a response to the angst in the world, an evocation of the English countryside, a harking back to a simpler, bucolic time that, with the rise of industrialization, seemed to be disappearing before Ralph Vaughan Williams’ very eyes. It is the most [...]
Propaganda has both short-term and long-term consequences. In the short term, propaganda can influence people to support particular policies, even if those policies cut against their best interests. In the long run, propaganda erodes democratic foundations. The Imaginative Conservative's Brad Birzer interviews Abigail R. Hall, co-author of "Manufacturing Militarism," which Dr. Birzer reviewed in these [...]
I cannot fully accept the world of John Wick. But like the pagan world and the Old Testament’s eye-for-an-eye, I cannot fully reject it either. The world of Wick is a world of senseless violence and also violence that is roughly sensible because it is informed by justice. One of the most enjoyable action movie [...]
Perhaps we are not spirits trapped in a body. Perhaps we are spirit and body, spun together by the master weaver, yet now torn beyond immediate repair. Yet, someday, our threads may be respun, and there will be unity, true unity and what a weaving that will be. A barely acknowledged philosophy wedges itself between [...]
So, neither with a bang nor a whimper, the world ends with the remains of Western Civilization, now unlettered for many reasons, increasingly under-read, alone by choice, and still self-compelled to communicate. Never has the stock market soared higher nor the supply of affordable books been cheaper. Lucky or cursed, let us examine the latter—about [...]
Benjamin Harrison insisted America’s truly dangerous enemies were not Great Powers abroad but a lapse of integrity and purity at home. He believed republicanism would spread in the world by “sympathy and emulation” and feared the harm Americans might do to themselves and to others should they undertake to extend their institutions by force: “We [...]
How are evangelicals to navigate the current storms while remaining faithful to biblical truth and Christian compassion? How can we engage in true Christian dialogue without immediately pigeonholing our fellow evangelicals politically, or questioning their “true” motives, or holding them to a narrow litmus test of orthodoxy? The Secular Creed: Engaging Five Contemporary Claims, by [...]
I was still puzzled by the mystery of why Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had permitted me, an unknown writer, to visit him for an interview when he had spurned the advances of many better-known authors. The mystery was solved by his wife, Natalya, soon after she had welcomed me. In my previous essay, we concluded with my [...]
Expertly researched and well written, "Manufacturing Militarism" considers the history of propaganda over the last 100 years of American history, focusing especially on the Iraq War and the continuing War on Terrorism. Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror by Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall (Stanford University Press, 2021) Given [...]
The lesson for American conservatives is this: Shrink the size and aspirations of government at home and abroad; shun future foreign entanglements as General Washington advised; but keep cooperating more closely with Afghans and stick it out for America’s own lasting safety. If American leaders can survive the impatience of their electorate, success may be [...]
Every empire had security reasons, to go along with economic ones, to justify permanent military occupation. I say this: Kill the terrorists. Destroy their bases. When necessary, go back and do it again. Don’t occupy foreign nations. As the United States pulls its troops out of Afghanistan after a 20-year war, The Imaginative Conservative looks back at [...]
The Afghan War was, at its inception, a just war. If the Taliban would not turn over bin Laden and those who plotted the mass murder of 3,000 Americans, we had a right to go in after him. But we decided to stay on and convert the most tribalized and xenophobic land on earth into [...]
Had I to choose a musical summer idyll, my choice would be Jour d’été à la montagne (Summer’s Day in the Mountains), a tone poem by the French Romantic composer Vincent d’Indy. D’Indy (1851–1931) is one of those composers celebrated in their day whose music has since fallen into obscurity (his other “mountain” piece, Symphony [...]
An unquestioned sense of nationalistic superiority, racial no longer, is now more American than British, and in Afghanistan every step of interaction from American officials is calculated to diminish, insult or express official disdain for the foreign subjects of Empire. As the United States pulls its troops out of Afghanistan after a 20-year war, The [...]