Mark Twain’s “Joan of Arc”

By |2024-01-08T17:44:12-06:00January 8th, 2024|Categories: Books, Christianity, G.K. Chesterton, Religion, Stephen Masty, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

“I studied that girl, Joan of Arc, for twelve years,” Mark Twain said, “and it never seemed to me that the artists and the writers gave us a true picture of her. They drew a picture of a peasant. But they always missed the face—the divine soul, the pure character, the supreme woman, the wonderful [...]

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth

By |2024-01-02T19:03:13-06:00January 2nd, 2024|Categories: Books, Bradley J. Birzer, Imagination, J.R.R. Tolkien, Myth, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

Myth, J.R.R. Tolkien thought, can convey the sort of profound truth that is intransigent to description or analysis in terms of facts and figures. But, Tolkien admitted, myth can be dangerous if it remains pagan. Therefore, one must sanctify it. To enter faerie—that is, a sacramental and liturgical understanding of creation—is to open oneself to [...]

Fantasy & the Real World: Tolkien’s Philosophy of Myth

By |2024-01-02T19:46:13-06:00January 2nd, 2024|Categories: Imagination, J.R.R. Tolkien, Joseph Pearce, Myth, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

Fantasy shows us ourselves in the light of the fullness of the natural and supernatural reality in which we find ourselves. Does so-called fantasy literature have any relevance to the so-called real world? Such a question is worth asking and indeed answering but can only be addressed if we have a clear understanding of what [...]

Pagans, a Pope, & Sauron: How We Got New Year’s Day

By |2023-12-31T18:31:01-06:00December 31st, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Culture, History, J.R.R. Tolkien, New Year's Day, Timeless Essays|

As you celebrate New Year’s Day remember that for one thousand years the welcoming of a new year was not just a calendar event, but a culturally religious event which linked the renewal of nature with the redemption of the world. Some atheists, Muslims, and Christian fundamentalists like to grumble and gibe that the celebration [...]

The Incarnation of Truth and Love

By |2023-12-24T23:27:09-06:00December 24th, 2023|Categories: Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christmas, Love, Paul Krause, Reason, Senior Contributors, Theology, Timeless Essays|

The real claim of Christmas, for Christians, is that Truth and Love penetrated the cosmos. Christmas is a warm, loving, and tender season precisely for this reason. That warm fire, or bright sky, or joyful company, is made possible only because that God which ever lives and loves—to which the whole creation moves—entered the creation [...]

Tolkien and Lewis Under the Christmas Tree

By |2023-12-15T17:26:54-06:00December 14th, 2023|Categories: Books, C.S. Lewis, Christian Humanism, Christmas, Gifts for Imaginative Conservatives, J.R.R. Tolkien, Louis Markos, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

With a seemingly (and thankfully) endless supply of books about J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis flowing out from every conceivable press, it is easy to overlook some hidden gems. To assist Imaginative Conservative readers with their Christmas book shopping, I have highlighted below some books about Lewis and/or Tolkien that have been published over the [...]

Pitiful Caliban and Gollum

By |2023-12-06T20:05:20-06:00December 6th, 2023|Categories: Dwight Longenecker, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literature, Senior Contributors, William Shakespeare|

Gollum and Caliban are not humans who transmogrify temporarily into beasts. They are horrific hybrids: half humans (or hobbits) who have been taken over by the bestial nature of the dark side. While they have become monstrous, their horror is mixed with humanity. J.R.R. Tolkien was famously antipathetic towards Shakespeare, and there is no suggestion [...]

Reaching Into the Silence

By |2023-12-02T20:47:55-06:00December 2nd, 2023|Categories: Books, Catholicism, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Religion, Theology|

Ours is a restless, noisy, superficial world terrified by silence, enthralled with politics, disdainful of interiority. The modern secular person looks out, perhaps even with pride, at its bleak utilitarian contours, blinking, yet slouching towards metaphysics. But the Catholic humanist, remembering with a certain grateful awe Gerard Manley Hopkins’ insight that "the world is charged [...]

The Power of Ideology: Christopher Dawson on the Modern Age

By |2023-11-28T19:58:56-06:00November 28th, 2023|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, History, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, Western Civilization|

Since the Renaissance, Christopher Dawson feared, Western culture and society had embraced an arrogant form of humanism, one that places too much emphasis on the goodness of the human person. With the loss of the Medieval beliefs in the Economy of Grace and the Great Chain of Being, culture had adopted two radically dangerous institutions: [...]

C.S. Lewis and the Cultivation of the Imagination

By |2023-11-21T22:22:49-06:00November 21st, 2023|Categories: Books, C.S. Lewis, Christian Humanism, Featured, Imagination, Timeless Essays|

C.S. Lewis’ lesson to his friends and fans—and to us—is that the cultivation of the imagination might require more than reading and writing, but it requires no less. Readers likely know C.S. Lewis by the works of his imagination, first encountering him in the snowdrifts of the Narnian woods or on an omnibus bound for [...]

On the Measure and Conservation of Human Things

By |2023-11-16T18:06:19-06:00November 16th, 2023|Categories: C.S. Lewis, Christianity, Fr. James Schall, Politics, Timeless Essays, Walker Percy|Tags: , |

The man who sets out only to be human somehow becomes less than human. We ignore the highest things at our peril. Human things are finite, incomplete; nonetheless, they are real and worthy. They are worth keeping. For the truth of knowledge is measured by the knowable object. For it is because a thing is [...]

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