About George Stanciu

George Stanciu is Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. He earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Michigan and taught at St. John's College, Santa Fe. Dr. Stanciu is the Academic Dean Emeritus at Magdalen College of Liberal Arts in Warner, New Hampshire, and he is the co-author of The New Biology and The New Story of Science.

Liberal Education: Piercing the Dome

By |2024-03-18T20:50:26-05:00March 18th, 2024|Categories: Democracy, Education, Freedom, Liberal Learning|

Three proposed ends of liberal education — career, democracy, and a free mind — do not pierce the dome of the bourgeois workaday world. Let us begin anew with a question: “How can liberal education pierce the dome that encloses the bourgeois workaday world?" This essay was originally delivered at Magdalen College on October 25, [...]

Capitalism and the Gospel of Love

By |2023-09-06T19:06:29-05:00September 6th, 2023|Categories: Adam Smith, American Republic, Capitalism, Economics, Free Markets, George Stanciu, Love, Modernity, Timeless Essays|

In “The Wealth of Nations,” Adam Smith was absolutely right: The widespread division of labor would cause the interior life to die; an unsurprising result, for under capitalism, the human person became a commodity, a resource, a thing used to further profits. My parents, Romanian gypsies, born in a Transylvanian village and raised in thatched-roofed [...]

Modernity: A Rebellion Against God

By |2023-07-31T19:51:59-05:00July 31st, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Existence of God, Francis Bacon, George Stanciu, Modernity, Science|

Francis Bacon imagined a glorious future for us once our ancestors made themselves the masters and possessors of Nature; however, the ever-ascending arc of science and technology turned out to be not under human control. Physicists, neuroscientists, and computer and genetic engineers are the new sorcerer’s apprentices, having summoned great forces they can now not [...]

How Modernity Diminishes the Human Person

By |2023-06-22T17:04:34-05:00June 22nd, 2023|Categories: Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Apple, Capitalism, Community, Democracy, Democracy in America, Featured, George Stanciu, St. John's College, Technology, Timeless Essays|

Because of the strong secular faith instilled in us by education, most of us trust that science and technology, democracy, and capitalism, the three legs of Modernity, can bring about only good ends and fail to see that these three triumphs of humankind can diminish the human person. With the publication of the book The [...]

Materialism: The False God of Modern Science

By |2023-03-01T13:50:50-06:00March 1st, 2023|Categories: Existence of God, George Stanciu, Philosophy, Reason, Science, St. John's College, Timeless Essays|

Trained to believe that every object as well as every act in the universe is matter, an aspect of matter, or produced by matter—that is, schooled to be a materialist—I scoffed at the two fellow students of mine in graduate school who regularly attended church. For me, at that time, the brain was the mind [...]

Physics, Beauty, & the Divine Mind

By |2022-10-16T14:49:46-05:00October 16th, 2022|Categories: Beauty, Culture, Featured, George Stanciu, Religion, Science, St. John's College, Timeless Essays|

Last week, my wife, a painter-friend of ours, who wishes to be anonymous, and I did the Friday night walk down Canyon Road, the site of numerous galleries in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a small town that is the third-largest art market in the United States. Halfway down Canyon Road, we stopped in at a [...]

The New Barbarians: Los Alamos & the End of Mankind

By |2023-07-16T00:52:42-05:00August 8th, 2022|Categories: George Stanciu, History, Science, St. John's College, Technology, Timeless Essays, War|

The Nation-State possesses an absolute moral authority that overrules the authority of any religion and every individual citizen.The new barbarians gave to the Nation-State a weapon that Genghis Khan never dreamed of, a “technically-sweet” marvel that could destroy humankind thrice over on a lazy Saturday afternoon. I am a Romanian gypsy from a long line [...]

The Best Possible World and Concrete Living

By |2022-07-18T19:30:44-05:00July 18th, 2022|Categories: Adam Smith, Capitalism, Free Markets, George Stanciu, Politics, Timeless Essays|

When we strip away all the fancy arguments and strong opinions about capitalism, or industrialism if you like, we see a person in the workplace is a commodity, a thing to be used up and discarded. As a result, capitalism creates a thing-oriented society, where machines, profits, and properties are more important than people. I [...]

The Virtues of Patriotism, the Vices of Nationalism

By |2022-04-24T17:26:31-05:00April 24th, 2022|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, Featured, George Stanciu, Nationalism, Patriotism, St. John's College, Timeless Essays|

Patriotism—the love of place, countrymen, and local traditions—lasted for millennia, until replaced by nationalism, which we believe is a natural outgrowth of tribal life, instead of an invention of Western Europe. I sat through elementary school not knowing that to guarantee new generations of virtuous and patriotic citizens, the French Revolution established the first comprehensive [...]

The Three Great Teachers

By |2021-08-28T09:05:06-05:00June 26th, 2021|Categories: Christianity, Eastern Thought, George Stanciu, Homer, Plato, Religion, Socrates, St. John's College, Timeless Essays, Virtue|

Each great teacher locates the fundamental problem of human living differently: The Buddha cites suffering; Socrates points to ignorance; and Jesus identifies faulty love. In addition, all three Masters teach that the task set for each human soul is to travel from illusion to reality. Unlike the Age of Faith, in Postmodernity, or more accurately [...]

God Said; We Say

By |2020-08-27T16:04:57-05:00August 28th, 2020|Categories: Christianity, George Stanciu, Language, Nature, Order, Science, Senior Contributors|

Language is at the heart of Creation. Because we are created in the image of God who spoke and created intelligible matter, our language mirrors Creation in a hazy, incomplete way. Our speech calls into existence names and creates a narrative to link together our experiences in a coherent way. A life without words is [...]

Is Christianity in America Subservient to Capitalism?

By |2020-07-16T20:13:27-05:00July 16th, 2020|Categories: Capitalism, Charity, Christianity, Economics, George Stanciu, Labor/Work, Modernity, Senior Contributors|

The silence from the pulpit about the low-wage workers, 44% of the population, is disgraceful, although understandable, because Christianity in America has rarely challenged the ethos of capitalism. As a result, churches have virtually no role in political or economic life. The COVID-19 Pandemic has revealed that we no longer have the equivalent of such [...]

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