The use of criticism as T.S. Eliot sees that use in his Harvard lectures in 1932-1933 is to discover the degree of a proper accommodation of the poet as a person to his work, in a just judgment of both poet and poem. The judgment is not so limited as it had seemed in 1920 [...]
In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. — Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto I, l. The classical Greeks described, in etiological terms, the search or quest for “the ground of existence” by the use of the word aition. Aristotle applies [...]
The Academy Award nominated filmmaker will offer thematic and cultural commentary in Houston on October 1st. (To register for this event, please click here.) “Whatever Whit Stillman’s politics may be, the very form of his artistic sensibility illuminates what an imaginative conservative cultural intervention in our time might entail… In each of [his] films a note [...]
Pope Francis “No one is saved alone, as an isolated individual, but God attracts us looking at the complex web of relationships that take place in the human community. God enters into this dynamic, this participation in the web of human relationships.” Pope Francis to Antonio Spadaro SJ What is a conservative, really? [...]
“I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy, By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.” —Walt Whitman [1] Ronald Reagan’s vision of America’s role in the world, especially as it was expressed in his presidential speeches, continues to resonate with many Americans. President George [...]
T.E. Hulme reminded his audience that conservatism and humanism need not compromise on certain ideals. As Bearers of the Word, we too can recapture the spirit of Hulme as embodied in tradition, virtue, and heroic sacrifice. A few years ago, I had the privilege of writing an essay for The Imaginative Conservative about the almost nearly forgotten Cambridge [...]
Like a house illuminated by natural light from the five windows of the senses, our soul receives information from outside. But how do we “process” this information? How do we arrive at the forms that enable us to identify what we see, the constants and universals that enable us to recognize a flower or a [...]
by W. Winston Elliott III There is still time to sign up for this Saturday’s conference celebrating the 60th anniversary of the publication of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. The program is being held at Houston Baptist University. Speakers include The Imaginative Conservative’s Bradley J. Birzer, Gleaves Whitney, W. Winston Elliott III and Barbara J. Elliott. Please use [...]
For more than a half century, now, we have heard that we have a “living” constitution. And it has always been difficult to argue with this position. After all, the opposite of a “living” constitution is a dead one. And who wants to be seen defending the dead hand of the past? Wouldn’t we all [...]
In the twentieth century, no novelist exerted a stronger influence upon political opinion, in Britain and America, than did George Orwell. Also Orwell was the most telling writer about poverty. In a strange and desperate way, Orwell was a lover of the permanent things. Yet because he could discern no source of abiding justice and [...]
A type of book which we hardly seem to produce in these days, but which flowered with great richness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is what Chesterton called the ‘good bad book’: that is, the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have [...]
It is surprising that contemporary political thinking has paid relatively scant attention to St. Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo. It may be true, as some say, that we live in the post-Christian era. It certainly cannot be gainsaid that we live in an age of pervasive secularism in which a name such as Augustine seems [...]
Michael S. Schneider’s wonderful work A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe, which I recommended in Beauty for Truth’s Sake, is linked to a lot of classroom teaching that Michael has done over the years. This has now been captured in his superb DVD called Constructing the Universe, which could be an important resource for teachers and parents [...]
The Hidden Story of Narnia: A Book-by-Book Guide to C. S. Lewis’ Spiritual Tales by Will Vaus (Winged Lion Press, 2010) When the film version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe hit movie screens in December of 2005, religion-aversive media critics proclaimed with self-satisfied glee that all those naïve Christians who saw the Christian gospel [...]