Dante’s “Inferno” is the poem of interiority. It aims to crack the crusty shell of the heart and gain access to its secret, guarded places. Although the Comedy is a poem of impeccable order, the poet is careful to make sure that our first impression is not of the poem’s architecture but of its emotional [...]
A hero is someone you admire to the point of losing sleep over. A hero is one the ancients were tempted to worship, with the ardent hope that some of the strength from his dead body would seep into the ground and make their crops fertile. A hero, you admit, is better than you are, [...]
The experience of nostalgia is a feeling of beauty’s remoteness, but only because it is so far in the future. It is hope. I went for a long walk in Oxford the other night. The city, of course, is always enchanting, but in early summer and at night, it is so the most. When summer [...]
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Jason Baxter, as he considers why Christians should read the works of the pagans. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher At the end of each semester, I inevitably have one or two well-meaning students who are still unsure why they were asked [...]
As a professor who values intelligence, I tend to like most those students who talk to me about books and ideas. Yet recently when a student, unasked, quietly shoveled the snow from my sidewalk, he taught me a lesson about a profound depth of goodness that I need to study up on. G.K. Chesterton joked, [...]
Philosopher Charles Taylor is insistent that we are all “secular,” by which he means, denied of the “naive” experience of religion as encountered in the pre-modern world. See how much you agree or disagree with Dr. Taylor by taking this quiz… Charles Taylor As many of The Imaginative Conservative’s readers already know, the [...]
The humanities can fill us with a kind of reverent admiration for a place in its particularity, and fill us with a delight that such a thing exists, untouched, un-owned by us. It can help us open our grasping hands and let beauty be, whether or not it is possessed by me… I would like [...]
There seems to be very little cultural space for humanistic studies. It is difficult to perceive how literature, philosophy, or theology could contribute to technological capitalism… I would like you to imagine the following situation: Sometime after graduation a college student is hired as an intern at his university’s newly founded Center for Leadership Studies [...]
At the end of each semester, I inevitably have one or two well-meaning students who are still unsure why they were asked to devote so much time and care to reading, annotating, and discussing archaic Greek literature. They enjoyed reading Homer. They liked our conversations in class, but, at the end of the course, lacking [...]