On July the 11th the Church celebrates the feast of St. Benedict of Nursia, the gentle founder of the Benedictine order and by extension the father of Monasticism. A moderate and modest man he would have been astonished to learn that his ‘simple school for prayer, ’his ‘modest rule for beginners’ led to the foundation of communities [...]
To link spiritualism, political philosophy, and play together is, at first sight, rash. What could they possibly have in common, since they clearly are not the same?… Spiritualism seems to me absolutely right on all its mystical side. The supernatural part of it seems to me quite natural. The incredible part of it seems to [...]
The left owns the microphone and is not going to give it up. Conservatives need to buy their own microphones… If you want to reach the mainstream population with the message of conservative values, then you have a very difficult task before you. How is the conservative voice heard when the microphones of the mainstream [...]
For some time now, our political rhetoric has increasingly moved toward an opposition between classes, causing tension—indeed a kind of warfare—between what Aristotle called the few rich and the many poor. Our founders worked hard to bridge this gap… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Virginia Arbery as [...]
The so-called Boromir Option raises the question as to whether it is ever permissible to use evil means in pursuit of a good end… In a recent essay for the Imaginative Conservative I wrote about what I called the Mercutio Option, based on the character in Romeo & Juliet who cursed both the warring factions [...]
This time of retrenchment is also the opportunity to begin reconceiving what a new Christian culture—made from the old—might look like… The recently revived Wyoming School of Catholic Thought has me thinking about how we escape from the “immanent frame,” as Charles Taylor describes our secular age. In a lecture and discussion led by Dr. [...]
We display our dignity by imposing our will on nature to create a world where we can live as dignified beings—or not as miserably self-conscious and utterly precarious accidents… As we remember our friend Peter Augustine Lawler (1951–2017), we are proud to publish this selection from his insightful book Modern and American Dignity (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2010). [...]
Through the Tea Club he formed with his young classmates, J.R.R. Tolkien felt his first comradery among friends dedicated to something higher than themselves… Long before Tolkien began his own personal mythology, he had already lived a rather full life. Joy as well as tragedy had filled it. His father had passed away while Tolkien, [...]
As major players on the global stage, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump could counterbalance the forces of globalism which seek to destroy all sovereign nations… Can we trust Russia? Should we trust Russia? Should we trust Trump on Russia? The buzz word of Barack Obama’s Presidential Election Campaign, oh so many eons ago, was “change.” [...]
Whether or not Mary Surratt participated in the conspiracy to kill Abraham Lincoln will never be known with certainty. But we can judge definitively the manner in which federal authorities obtained her conviction, and ultimately her execution. “Passion governs, and she never governs wisely,” wrote Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Galloway in 1775.[1] Wise words from [...]
There is no escape from historical existence. With all its contingencies, unexpected happenings, and mysteries, historical existence offers opportunities for grasping the great drama of life. Conservative intellectuals have long been suspicious of the pressures that political ideologies place on the writing of history. Most famously, Herbert Butterfield, in his classic work, The Whig Interpretation [...]
Contemporary liberalism provides solutions that only exacerbate current domestic and international tensions… The Cultural Defense of Nations: A Liberal Theory of Majority Rights by Liav Orgad (Oxford University Press, 2016) Liberal constitutional and political theory has increasingly defended the status of often newly created or invented minorities, defined more expansively with each new theoretical formulation, as [...]
One of the fathers of authentic American music, Scott Joplin had an enormous influence, reaching even beyond America to Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky… “It is never right to play ragtime fast.” This admonition from the composer appeared on more than one of Scott Joplin’s rags, written between the time of his residence in Sedalia, [...]
In favor of Trinity Lutheran, the Supreme Court ruled that a government program cannot require a church “to renounce its religious character in order to participate in an otherwise generally available public benefit program for which it is fully qualified…” In its decision in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer this week, the Supreme Court took another [...]