Has man by his new powers made animals unwild again? Has man come back into the inheritance of the old Adam, who named the beings God brought before him? Does the panther really belong in a cage? His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It [...]
The great Greek historian Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus was born a little more than a decade after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, and it was at that early date that he considered up the significance of the seemingly insignificant chicken-and-egg question. In his notable work Moralia, in a discussion on love, Plutarch appropriately notes that the “problem about the [...]
One of the wonderful things about The Imaginative Conservative is the way in which it has become a powerful forum for thoughtful and thought-provoking writers to exchange thoughtful and thought-provoking ideas. There’s none of the knee-jerk and thoughtless reaction to events to be found on other cultural and political journals. Deo gratias! This does not mean, [...]
Unanalyzed Responses Anxiety and deep insecurity are the characteristic responses evoked by the crisis in tradition. To experience them, it is not necessary for a people to be actively aware of what is happening to it. The process of erosion need only undermine the tradition and a series of consequences begin unfolding within the individual, while [...]
In the first essay of this series, I discussed the three things that one must know about Edmund Burke in order to understand the cohesiveness of his vision, a vision which spanned his adult life. While he developed this vision, he never radically altered it, as many of his opponents claims. These opponents simply could not understand how [...]
Every now and again a left wing academic (pardon the redundancy) states his prejudices so baldly and unselfconsciously that he provides a highly useful insight into the mind of his class. Such is the case with an essay published in the Raleigh News & Observer by William Snider, a professor in the department of neurology [...]
Of old sat freedom on the heights, The thunders breaking at her feet; Above her shook the starry lights; She heard the torrents meet. […]
“I know what I like, and I don’t like that!” is the usual response by hoi polloi when faced with modern art. When the modern art is in church the response is even more visceral and vicious: “It’s horrible! It’s disgusting! It’s a blasphemy!” There are few more obscene contradictions in our modern world than [...]
My list of pet peeves is short, and it runs like this: traffic, small dogs, and shopping. Fate has ruled that I shall always dislike these three things, and there’s no help for it. But for now, I want to focus only on the last one. Though I’ve spent my whole life ignoring clothing stores, [...]
I, like you, was born in the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age of Hindu mythology, when all the great faiths of the world are on the wane. The secular faith in the Nation-State, in grand schemes to institute Paradise on Earth, and in placing transcendent hope in human institutions has been destroyed by history. No [...]
"I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a [...]
In our modern age, the dragon of pride has been unleashed to do its worst, narcissism turned to Nazissism. More than a century ago, in 1911 to be precise, Holbrook Jackson published a book entitled Platitudes in the Making, a volume of aphorisms expressive of Jackson’s radical relativism. “Truth,” Jackson proclaimed platitudinously, “is one’s own [...]
Even when wealth and noble birth are connected with talents, the two sets of talents differ, and those possessed by the nobleman are likely to be of greater worth than are those possessed by the man of wealth. Within his general view of man as naturally social, John Adams explored the nature of the passion [...]
Many Catholics treat the High Middle Ages as a veritable ideal of civilization. But the medieval period produced problematic ideas about aesthetics, eccentric theories of economics, and dangerous assumptions about politics. Over a decade ago a then-acquaintance of mine inquired as to my economic views, my response being that I was “a distributist by default.” [...]