Power, in and of itself, has become an “ideology,” according to Robert Nisbet. It is, by its very nature, incapable of understanding nuance… As I had the opportunity to write in my previous essay for The Imaginative Conservative, Oxford University Press gave the grand sociologist and historian of ideas, Robert A. Nisbet, a chance to [...]
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels present a world teeming with people groping through guilt for a purpose they do not fully understand, often trading defiance for either despair or determination as the inescapable truth becomes clear: There is, on earth, no alleviation of the human condition… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the [...]
In the modern world of American politics, special-interest money is displacing voters. Wealth is highly concentrated in a few hands, with corporations wielding enormous power. More and more families patch together two or more paychecks to meet the widening income, healthcare, and pension gaps that are threatening the middle class… After a disastrous defeat in [...]
In a certain way, Christ is both priest and offering, a self-sacrifice transcending both concepts. This is something the classical world found disquieting. The extent to which the pagan classical world and Christianity are able to tell a common story has had an uneven history. In late antiquity, the Church Fathers were reluctant disciples of [...]
President Orbán has the courage and integrity to stand up to the secularist bullying of the European Union and to the efforts to force Hungary to allow countless Islamic immigrants into its midst. And yet even heroes need correcting when they get things wrong… The discussion of Hillaire Belloc’s writing on Europe and the Faith, [...]
Frank Meyer was a man looking desperately for faults in the philosophy to which he was most attracted: traditionalism. Finding none, he simply made up another philosophy: fusionism. But instead of coopting the energy and scientific rigor of libertarianism for the traditionalist cause, he simply empowered the former at the latter’s expense… American conservatism originates [...]
Allan Bloom’s diagnosis in The Closing of the American Mind can explain far more about the sorry state of American higher education and the Western condition than popular stories that blame the Enlightenment, or democracy, or medieval nominalism. And it is therefore a valuable starting point… Last year marked the thirtieth anniversary of Allan Bloom’s [...]
The exponential proliferation of books is a sign of our culture’s loss of an ultimate, shared purpose to life, and a consensus on how to achieve that purpose. Devoid of this consensus, each of us is left to search for the fragments of truth in our frantic, scattered regimen of reading each year… In the [...]
If John Dewey’s theories had been accurate, it should have been the beginning of a bright new age of understanding. Instead, the world of the young has become uglier and increasingly self-centered… The story of American public education begins with Horace Mann. It was Mann who popularized the idea that American schools should teach all [...]
The abuse of opioids, like other addictions, stems from a profound spiritual problem deep inside the souls of countless Americans. But when people turn to the sublimity of heavenly things, they acquire the ability to overcome their frenetic appetites and look for spiritual solutions… An opioid crisis is devastating America. Every day, more than ninety [...]
Not only is a leader an agent of force and something of a philosopher, but he must also be a kind of corporate prophet… The philosopher Eric Voegelin labored for many years in relative obscurity until his death in 1985. Even now his disciples are drawn largely from conservative academe, which is so marginal as [...]
"That brings me to the protection of the exchanges that are the life of learning from dangers both within and without the classroom. Of these there are many, of which I’ll mention only one: the corruption of conversation into debate, into argument, and even into discussion, into all the modes of human communication in which [...]
God unequally bestows gifts to us that are to be used for the common good. The wise can guide others; the well-organized can administer businesses that provide employment; the strong can protect the weak. With such an understanding, equality and a hierarchical social structure are not incompatible, but complement each other. My three children grew [...]
ABCs of the Christian Life is a new book that will tax the patience of the most enthusiastic Chestertonian… ABCs of the Christian Life: The Ultimate Anthology of the Prince of Paradox by G.K. Chesterton (180 pages, Ave Maria Press/Christian Classics, 2017) These days, new books on Chesterton are ten a penny, as are new editions [...]