Father Christmas and the Christian father share a domestic priesthood that presides over the Christmas mysteries. Christmas calls on fathers far and wide to take up the books of Christmas, to draw their children into a ring round fire or tree to be read to... When St. Nick drives his miniature sleigh full of toys drawn [...]
The cover of a book is like the door of a quaint cottage in the woods. It entices, appeals, and even tempts you to peek in the window before you walk inside the story. These beauties are ones families can give and purchase for a lifetime of use… I do love a beautiful book. The [...]
For students of leadership for a just society, the movie “Ride the High Country” crystallizes beliefs and codes of behavior worth studying, affirming, and claiming today. If you want to know what made the statesman and military leader George Catlett Marshall (1880–1959) great, then watch Ride the High Country (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), and you will receive a taste of [...]
Like it or not, final exams provide a better analogy to the Last Judgment than one would like to think: All that was hidden comes to light… Finals: the very word does something alarming to the spine. This week, as students at Wyoming Catholic College go into the classroom for a three-hour test or wait [...]
Here are four recently-published books and four new classical music albums that I have greatly enjoyed this past year… Books I’ve read several excellent biographies (and one great autobiography) this past year. Foremost among the former is Jan Swafford’s magisterial Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph, which could easily be termed the definitive biography of perhaps the greatest [...]
America was a world in which this other world that I had grown up in was intellectually, morally, and spiritually irrelevant. That there should be such a plurality of worlds had a devastating effect on me. The experience broke for good my provincialism of a Central European or generally European kind without letting me fall [...]
What we need most are things spiritual, not material. We need things that will not agitate us but that will fill us with peace and order… In making my list of gift suggestions for Christmas, I could not help but reflect that what we need most are things spiritual, not material. We need things that [...]
Lee Edwards has not just known the greats of post-World War II conservatism, but he has also lived with them, and as one of them… Celebrating his eighty-fifth year on this earth, Lee Edwards is a remarkable cultural treasure, a man’s man, a gentleman’s gentleman, and a conservative’s conservative. Biographer of Ronald Reagan and of [...]
Before first-frost enfolds the woodland glade, Compelling fowl and foliage to flight, Anoint the earth with balm of prayers prayed. The bodies of beleaguered brothers laid Have yet to rot and yet to reunite, Before first-frost enfolds the woodland glade. […]
America’s Founders did not want Congress to establish a national church, and many opposed establishments at the state level as well. Yet there was virtually no support for the sort of separation of church and state promoted today by organizations such as the ACLU. In Everson v. Board of Education (1947), Justice Wiley Rutledge proclaimed that “no [...]
What better way to celebrate the holidays than with 50% off books? I’m with Abraham Lincoln: “My best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.” So when The Imaginative Conservative asks me for Christmas gift recommendations, I immediately think of books. What better gift could there be? Since you’re reading [...]
While hall passes and tardy slips are still used in schools, violations of more important principles seldom have real consequences… Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth by Everett Piper (256 pages, Regnery Publishing, 2017) Dr. Everett Piper’s Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth[1] talks about the political correctness [...]
If art cannot save our souls, it can do much to redeem the time, to give us a true image of ourselves, both in the horror and the boredom to which we can descend, and in the glory which we may, in rare moments, be privileged to glimpse. Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series [...]
Richard Strauss' "Dreaming by the Fireside" ("Träumerei am Kamin") is one of the four orchestral interludes that the composer wrote for his 1924 opera, Intermezzo. Strauss himself wrote the libretto for this two-act drama, basing it on incidents in his marriage to his wife Pauline. The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of [...]