Kate Montclair is dying. She has arrived at late middle age loveless, childless, and having failed to achieve the career dreams of her youth. Now diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, she sees the next fourteen months of suffering as an intolerable prospect. Kate is desperate—not only for a miracle cure, but for some sense [...]
During this Holy Week, perhaps we can pray that the uncanny pull so many feel toward the ever-after will lead to a deeper reflection on the paradises, earthly and heavenly, from which the fairy stories we enjoy get their point and purpose. One of my favorites passages in Dante’s Purgatorio is when Dante finally reaches [...]
There is nothing like the kinetic energy of live actors treading the boards to excite the mind’s passion. That is why we cannot leave the theater to its decline. The political implications of its failure are serious ones. Did anybody catch this year’s Tony Awards? I thought so. Actually, I didn’t watch the whole thing [...]
If literature is not in any sense a mode of description, then what does it really communicate but feeling? In 1961 the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch published an essay in Encounter entitled, “Against Dryness.” In it, she laments the way in which our “scientific, anti-metaphysical age” has left us with “far too shallow and [...]
At the beginning of the third volume of Evelyn Waugh’s masterful World War II trilogy, Sword of Honor, Guy Crouchback, a British Catholic officer entering a disillusioned middle age, has a conversation with his elderly father in which he disparages the Lateran Treaty. Gervase Crouchback rebukes his son’s irascibility. “My dear boy,” he said, “you’re [...]
Naïve. Imprudent. A “Jesuit.” Such are some of the negative attributes that have been imputed to Pope Francis in the worried emails and dismayed blog posts that have come across my laptop screen in the week since the English publication of the Holy Father’s interview with Antonio Spadaro, S.J. Why such consternation from those who number themselves [...]
Would that I had received the education of my children! Last night at dinner our family enjoyed an unusually rich conversation prompted by a question that had arisen during my wife’s homeschooling history lesson with our seventh-grade son. In recent days these two have been working through the major thinkers of the Enlightenment using an [...]
An elderly woman picks up a telephone and a strange voice says, Remember you must die. “Who is that speaking, who is it?” the elderly Dame Lettie demands, but the caller, “as on eight previous occasions,” has already hung up. So who is it that is calling and saying these foreboding words to the cast of [...]
The only thrill, even of a common thriller, is concerned somehow with the conscience and the will.– G. K. Chesterton A book I much admire is the detective writer P.D. James’s little book, Talking About Detective Fiction, a distillation of the author’s insights into the genre she has practiced so well for nearly five decades. [...]
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 [...]
At the crescendo of his stirring cri de coeur, “Word and Anti-Word: A Christian Humanist Meditation,” Bradley Birzer asks how we might best undertake the renewal, inspired and grounded in the best intellectual traditions of the Christian West, that is so badly needed in our ever-darkening times. For an answer Dr. Birzer turns to Russell [...]
In a recent post here on The Imaginative Conservative I claimed that popular entertainment has a crucial political role within a democracy, because popular entertainment is the venue where most citizens gather to contemplate their collective self-understanding. If contemplation of the good life is going to occur on a mass scale, involving a wide spectrum [...]
Raphael’s School of Athens The humanities in American higher education are in deep crisis, and the cry of alarm released on June 18 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences will probably contribute little to a renaissance. How deep is the crisis? Here a few warning signals. According to the New York [...]
David Mamet is the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, film and television director, and author of many books of essays, most recently, in 2011, of the crackling libertarian manifesto, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture. The target of Mamet’s book is an updated version of Rousseau’s noble savage: a 21st-century peace-loving tribesman whose Eden it [...]