Countless Americans who woke up on the morning after the election sensed their prayers had been answered and a calamity had been averted. If we have been given this reprieve, then we should use it to turn back to God… To those Americans concerned about the moral state of the nation, the immediate reaction to [...]
May this Thanksgiving be a feast of many gifts, both in the families we love and in this great nation for which we pray... Thanksgiving has always been an occasion when we offer God our gratitude for the many blessings He has given us. It is surely the most familial of our national holidays, but [...]
At what other time of the year do families really come together in the way they do on Thanksgiving? I must admit, I always have mixed feelings about celebrating Thanksgiving. It’s not that I don’t love giving thanks—in fact, I really do love it. And, I especially love how we Americans do it. If I [...]
The sexual revolution has brought us a world wherein people sweat themselves to death in the pursuit of unhappiness. Some of those people, by the grace of God, miss their aim… What strikes me most powerfully about the defenders of the sexual revolution is their immovable abstraction. Always the matter is couched in terms of [...]
Donald Trump’s presidency will be a besieged presidency, and he would do well to enlist, politically speaking, a war cabinet and White House staff that relishes a fight and does not run… After a week managing the transition, vice president-elect Mike Pence took his family out to the Broadway musical “Hamilton.” As Pence entered the [...]
The truth is that the spirit of the world, the secular, cannot be defeated, except in the hearts of individuals, and even then it can be defeated only by the grace of God… One of the privileges of writing for The Imaginative Conservative is that one finds oneself in the company of so many great [...]
It is impossible to love both the victors and the vanquished, as the Iliad does, except from the place, outside the world, where God’s Wisdom dwells. Published originally during the Second World War, Simone Weil’s The Iliad, or the Poem of Force and Rachel Bespaloff’s On the Iliad are two of the last century’s finest discussions [...]
To Andreas Alcimus. How Germany is perishing by its own greed. That’s how things are; men die, expensively. They seek out lethal danger, with much war and worrying, and their pay consists of pain and loss. We are the fosterers, patrons of our pain. How proudly under Hector Priam’s kingdom and Troy, untoppled, happy, might [...]
“Animal Farm” hit a nerve at the right psychological moment in America, just when the pro-Soviet fellow-traveling movement was beginning to unravel. What havoc “a little squib” can cause! Seven decades ago, George Orwell’s Animal Farm was published in the United States. Its publication launch was August 26, 1946, almost exactly a year after its [...]
In a society which is increasingly feminized, a beard makes a statement about masculinity. It is a sign of masculinity to the world, and a sign of proper masculinity to the man himself. This month there is a campaign called “No Shave November” in which men are encouraged to grow facial hair. This is to [...]
There is nothing in the natural world, or in the inner and outer life of man, that does not find its counterpart in the all-embracing realm of tones. Music as symbol is the whole of all things. “They who were two and divided now became one and united.” —Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan and Isolde I [...]
What is one to think of those who not only refuse to learn the lessons that the gift of disabled children teach us but seek to exterminate the teachers so that they don’t have to learn the lessons?… A couple of months ago, whilst visiting the University of Mary in North Dakota to give a [...]
Now more than ever, we should revisit Edmund Burke’s thinking on political parties, since our modern party system seems to be entering a period of radical reconstruction, the results of which will either reinvigorate liberal democracy or bury it… With excellent timing, as Oxford University Press’s nine-volume edition of Edmund Burke’s writings and speeches reaches [...]
Post-war conservatism arose as a protest against the tapioca conformity of mass man and mass society. Any revival of conservatism will thus demand a recognition of true diversity and human dignity... For many Americans of my generation, conservatism represented the best hope for a truly diverse America, a country that valued individual persons against the [...]