I write today in celebration of P.G. Wodehouse’s sublimely mirthful Blandings stories, one of literary history’s greatest achievements in comic art. I want to submit that the genius of Blandings Castle is its resemblance to the Garden of Eden, the terrestrial paradise. In submitting as much I make no pretense of originality. It was Evelyn [...]
This material progress, in itself so splendid, does not meet any of the real needs of the human race…. No material progress, even though it takes shapes we cannot now conceive, or however it may expand the faculties of man, can bring comfort to his soul. It is this fact, more wonderful than any that [...]
It seems to be a tendency of literary critics to attach to the opinions of contemporary writers a significance unjustified with regard to the effect of such opinions upon current social movements. A Voltaire, an Adam Smith, even a Dickens’ Oliver Twist may change the world, but not so the works of the usual writer [...]
Previously on The Imaginative Conservative I have written about some of the twentieth and twentieth-first century’s greatest thinkers as teachers: Eric Voegelin, Ellis Sandoz, Gerhart Niemeyer, John H. Hallowell, Leo Strauss, Harvey Mansfield, and Stanley Rosen. Although these thinkers disagreed with one another in their scholarship from time to time, they all were committed to teaching the [...]
Vast topics are notoriously easy to avoid, and those who undertake to wrestle with them in public owe their audience some concrete reason for their choice. Let me begin with mine. First, this summer I had occasion to study Supreme Court decisions bearing on freedom of religion and the public schools. The graduate students with [...]
James Fenimore Cooper In these days of confident talk of an American reconstruction of Europe upon democratic principles, in these days of fall-of-France and it-can-happen-here novels by the score, it is more than a little interesting to look at, and even to read, certain stories of European life and politics written by a [...]
Edmund Burke: The First Conservative, by Jesse Norman In Edmund Burke: The First Conservative, Jesse Norman, a British Conservative party MP and doctoral graduate in philosophy, lays out a bold and engaging case for his subject as “one of the seminal thinkers of the present age”. Owing in part, no doubt, to the author’s profile in [...]
Alan Cornett at Dr. Kirk’s desk I am sure there was concern when they saw the canoe paddle float by, maybe even a bit of panic. Something had happened, possibly something bad. They were right. I was holding on to the most important American conservative writer of the twentieth century to keep him [...]
I’m a Batman snob. There, I’ve admitted it. And, I’ve been a Batman snob since I was a kid in the mid 1970s when I first became aware of the mythic superhero. And, though I don’t collect comics anymore (too time consuming and too money consuming), I have a fairly good collection of Batman, Green [...]
Around the turn of the century, England lost its only Catholic college dedicated to the exploration of social thought, economics, and politics (Plater College in Oxford). It seems remarkable not only that it was allowed to close, but that it had been the only institution of its kind. In the U.S., fortunately, there are several [...]
It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.—Winston S. Churchill The Imaginative Conservative applies [...]
The summer of 2013 saw strikes by fast food workers in seven cities. I doubt the increased difficulty in getting burgers and fries will endanger the republic. But we really should consider what this development tells us about conditions in our economy and our culture. Few of us think about it, but economists and policymakers [...]
Thoughts on The Mind of the South, by W. J. Cash W. J. Cash follows Mencken–and genuine Southern Stoics such as the poet William Alexander Percy–in having a very poor opinion of the uneducated individualism and raw emotion of Southern religion. It is, as Will Percy said, for “white trash” and for “Negroes” [...]
There seems to be no limit to the ambition of Bill Gates. After making tens of billions in the personal computer revolution, Gates has become a full-time cheerleader for leftist causes on a global scale—whether it’s reducing carbon emissions to zero by mid-century or reducing the world population by spending billions to pay for contraceptives in [...]