David L. Schindler, in Ordering Love: Liberal Societies and the Memory of God, sees this as a technological age not simply because of technological advancements but because of the way we think as the result of our technological orientation. He shows, within the context of politics, economics, science, and cultural and professional life generally, that God-centered love is [...]
President Obama buttered up the American taxeaters with his syrupy State of the Union address on Fat Tuesday night by tabling a massive stack of new spending proposals that are selling like hotcakes with folks who will never have to pick up the tab. If enacted, these proposals will pancake employers, batter investors, and will [...]
Admirers of C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (of which I am one–it is, for me, Lewis’s most compelling work of non-fiction), will remember that the inciting incident of his argument is a school textbook he calls, in order to save its authors from embarrassment, The Green Book. The moral theory Lewis discovers lying like a [...]
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to review Lord Percy’s Heresy of Democracy, a book Russell Kirk considered essential for an understanding of conservatism in the 1950s. Another book he had in list that was more or less unfamiliar to me was Ross J.S. Hoffman’s The Spirit of Politics and the Future of [...]
So I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but I like granola. But since when did getting a little closer to nature make you a hippie? There’s probably a better word—but hippie just works for me. They’ve won by the way—the hippies I mean. Not the unkemptness thankfully, but the outlook. You can see [...]
Every so often, acts of horror and terror come together with days of repentance and fasting and prayer, and force us to consider how great, and how conditional, is God’s creation. February 13th & 14th were the 68th anniversary of one of the cruelest allied acts of World War II, which most Americans still consider [...]
In Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, Christopher Dawson addresses two of the most pressing subjects of our day: the origin of Europe and the religious roots of Western culture. Click the link below to find this, and other books by Christopher Dawson, in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore! We hope you will join us [...]
Sunday’s New York Times carries a less than astonishing report, following the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s hearings on John O. Brennan’s nomination to be Director of Central Intelligence, that President Obama’s terrorism policies have turned out to be remarkably similar to his predecessor’s. “Obama’s Turn,” the headline runs, “in Bush’s Bind.” Bind? The suggestion [...]
According to the Washington Post, Washington DC’s public school district is planning to close 15 under-enrolled traditional schools: “If we don’t become very serious about marketing and competing with charter schools," [DC Councilman David] Catania said, “traditional public schools, as we know them, will become a thing of the past.” Charter schools have grown quickly [...]
The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope by Roger Scruton. In the excitement (and disappointment) of the politics of hope and change, surely a conservative’s responsibility must be to remind us that change is not the substance of things hoped for, and that reasonable hopes for those concrete goods really within human [...]
I have a small and secret desire, well-hid. Secret from whom, you ask? Secret from me, I suspect, Or maybe I am a suspect, secretly, Quietly desiring. This is the week to bring a secret forth Not by telling, no "big reveal" But quietly, like the secret itself Into the ashes of Wednesday morning. Ashes [...]
In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government by Charles Murray Throughout his long and highly productive career, Charles Murray has done the seemingly impossible. He has melded his strong libertarianism with respect for, and insights from, the work of Robert Nisbet and Russell Kirk. He has trained as a social scientist, worked for the Peace Corps, [...]
Gerhart Niemeyer In my previous essays about teaching in an age of ideology, I had looked at two teachers–Eric Voegelin and Ellis Sandoz–who sought to clear the ideological rubble in the modern academia so students could study the true, the beautiful, and the good. In his accessible lectures about complicated philosophical topics, Eric [...]
A little over a century ago, on August 16, 1911, the great visionary economist E. F. Schumacher was born in the German city of Bonn. An icon of the early Green movement, few people seem to know that Schumacher’s vision was inspired by the great papal encyclicals of Leo XIII and Pius XI or that [...]