About Jason Baxter

Jason M. Baxter is a college professor, speaker, and author of five books, including The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis and A Beginner's Guide to Dante's "Comedy". He teaches Great Books at Notre Dame and is a curricular consultant for St. Thomas More Academy in South Bend, Indiana.

Why Read Old (Pagan) Books?

By |2018-12-30T11:08:24-06:00December 30th, 2018|Categories: Christianity, Classics, Great Books, Humanities, Liberal Learning, Timeless Essays, Wyoming Catholic College|

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 [...]

The Wonder of “The Comedy”: How to Read Dante

By |2023-10-08T20:16:29-05:00May 2nd, 2018|Categories: Books, Christianity, Dante|

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 power. In [...]

Nostalgia for the Future: Antiquity & Eternity

By |2021-04-28T15:12:31-05:00July 6th, 2017|Categories: C.S. Lewis, Conservatism, England, Featured, History, Imagination, J.R.R. Tolkien, Oxford University, Time, Wyoming Catholic College|

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 [...]

Snow Angels, Goodness, and Intelligence

By |2021-02-18T20:28:06-06:00April 28th, 2017|Categories: Christianity, Dante, Humanities, Liberal Arts, Love, Virtue, Wyoming Catholic College|

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, [...]

How Much of a Modernist Are You? A Quiz for Conservatives

By |2017-04-06T12:37:19-05:00April 5th, 2017|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Modernity, Wyoming Catholic College|

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 [...]

Globalism, Technology… and the Humanities?

By |2017-02-09T11:51:28-06:00December 9th, 2016|Categories: Beauty, Culture, Featured, Humanities, Imagination, Liberal Learning, Poetry, Technology, Wyoming Catholic College|

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 [...]

Can the Humanities Contribute Anything to the Modern World?

By |2019-07-23T11:43:57-05:00November 29th, 2016|Categories: Capitalism, Culture, Featured, Humanities, Liberal Learning, Modernity, Technology, Wyoming Catholic College|

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 [...]

Why Read Old (Pagan) Books?

By |2019-09-24T10:19:31-05:00November 2nd, 2016|Categories: Christianity, Classics, Featured, Great Books, Humanities, Liberal Learning, Wyoming Catholic College|

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 [...]

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