Depicting the Whole Christ: Von Balthasar & Sacred Architecture

By |2024-03-10T14:44:45-05:00March 10th, 2024|Categories: Architecture, Beauty, Catholicism, Christianity, Communio, Culture, Featured, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Timeless Essays|

Architecture, just like sacred music or art, must fulfill its highest calling, aiding the participant in seeing the glory of God. An architecture that is ordered to fulfill only its human, or even liturgical use, fails its higher purpose. The theological work of twentieth-century theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar has only recently begun to take [...]

The Emergence of the Home Chapel

By |2024-02-25T15:18:33-06:00February 25th, 2024|Categories: Architecture, Christianity|

By building a chapel, the owner is inviting God into the home. By making it the most beautiful room in the house, the person recognizes God's primary place in one's life. The chapel builders represent one of those paradoxes where people feel the emptiness of the postmodern world that promises everything and wishes to fill [...]

The Year They Tore Salem Depot Down

By |2023-06-29T16:56:22-05:00June 29th, 2023|Categories: Architecture, Culture, History, Modernity, Timeless Essays|

We are lesser people for the disappearance of our architectural heritage. If Edmund Burke was correct that “to make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely,” then historical preservation takes on the same importance as land conservation. Both are inheritances to be held against the bulldozers of economic development. Salem Depot [...]

Impressions of a Soulless New Airport

By |2023-04-25T07:59:10-05:00April 24th, 2023|Categories: Architecture, Beauty, Culture, John Horvat|

Architecture, even in the case of airports, should uplift and inspire the soul to consider higher and wider panoramas. By their logic and beauty, buildings should speak to us of God, the source of all beauty. I lament that so many new buildings seem designed to limit horizons to the purely material, functional, and superficial. [...]

Traditional Worship: A Compendium of Culture

By |2023-03-24T20:43:27-05:00March 25th, 2023|Categories: Architecture, Art, Beauty, Catholicism, Christianity, Culture, Dwight Longenecker, Senior Contributors|

It would be wrong to compare the Mass too closely to a stage production, but in a traditional celebration of Mass there is what I call a “compendium of culture”: a combination of art, architecture, literature, logic, rhetoric, drama, poetry, metalwork, textile art, and woodwork. Why does this matter? It matters because matter matters. The [...]

Roger Scruton on the Aesthetics of Architecture

By |2023-01-19T16:48:50-06:00January 19th, 2023|Categories: Architecture, Art, Books, Christianity, Christopher Morrissey, Featured, Roger Scruton, Timeless Essays|

When the modern city enshrines the temporariness of facelessness as a permanently utilitarian way of life, then something has gone dreadfully wrong. The Aesthetics of Architecture by Roger Scruton (320 pages, Princeton University Press, 2013) One of the principal observations of Sir Roger Scruton about the modern city is an architectural observation. Modern architecture expresses [...]

Beauty: A Necessity, Not a Luxury

By |2023-08-04T09:27:45-05:00November 27th, 2022|Categories: Architecture, Art, Beauty, Books, Catholicism, Christianity, Communio, Essential, Featured, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Language, Pope Benedict XVI, St. John Paul II, Timeless Essays|

“Beauty will save the world.” That remains to be seen. But beauty has saved me, and continues to do so. My experience is that I need saving; it is not a luxury. Just when I am about to succumb to the sadness and living death of nihilism, some piercing ray of beauty breaks open my [...]

Where Is the Beauty in Buildings?

By |2022-09-12T17:36:47-05:00September 12th, 2022|Categories: Architecture, Beauty, Civilization, Culture, Modernity, Timeless Essays, Western Civilization|

Architecture exists all around us all the time. The consequence of bad architecture, therefore, is to make us feel less at home, as if the buildings glare at us as we go about our business, making an urban space into a place where no one feels welcome. So, what are the guiding principles of ‘good’ [...]

Leapfrogging the Enlightenment

By |2022-08-04T18:36:42-05:00August 4th, 2022|Categories: Architecture, Art, Culture, Enlightenment, History, Joseph Pearce, Literature, Senior Contributors|

There are some valuable lessons to be learned from the Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment and the various neo-medievalist movements which were its fruits. The most important is that society is not progressing inexorably in one “progressive” rationalist direction. The eighteenth century was a time of religious skepticism which seemed to foreshadow the eclipse of [...]

The Church Building as a Sacred Place: Beauty, Transcendence, & the Eternal

By |2022-06-01T21:53:14-05:00June 1st, 2022|Categories: Architecture, Art, Beauty, Books, Catholicism, Christianity, Essential, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

The fine arts are rightly classed among the noblest activities of man’s genius; this is especially true of religious art and of its highest manifestation, sacred art. Of their nature the arts are directed toward expressing in some way the infinite beauty of God in works made by human hands. Their dedication to the increase [...]

An Italian Fresco in the U.S. Capitol: Brumidi’s “The Apotheosis of Washington”

By |2023-08-16T18:17:16-05:00August 20th, 2021|Categories: Architecture, Art, Beauty, George Washington, History|

Constantino Brumidi’s fresco is less a deification of George Washington than it is a creative recording of his achievements and his legacy for our nation’s politicians. That the U.S. possesses its own rich history in art and boasts a series of internationally acclaimed painters is no surprise. Indeed, a walk through the Art Institute of [...]

G.K. Chesterton and the March of the Church Militant

By |2021-06-19T15:46:54-05:00June 19th, 2021|Categories: Architecture, Christianity, G.K. Chesterton, Joseph Pearce, Senior Contributors|

G. K. Chesterton, a truly humble soul, enrapt in gratitude and wonder, was moved to contemplate the deepest meaning of gothic architecture. More than a century later, our own souls find themselves singing in harmony with Chesterton as they hear and contemplate the beauty of his voice, and the beauty of the song he is [...]

The American College of the Building Arts

By |2021-06-11T09:02:07-05:00May 7th, 2021|Categories: Architecture, Beauty, Culture, Education, Labor/Work, Liberal Arts, Liberal Learning, W. Winston Elliott III|

A. Wade Razzi, Chief Academic Officer at American College of the Building Arts, is interviewed by W. Winston Elliott III, Editor-in-Chief of The Imaginative Conservative. W. Winston Elliott III: Describe ACBA and its mission. The American College of the Building Arts was founded in the wake of Hurricane Hugo, which did massive damage to the [...]

Designed for Distraction

By |2021-03-25T17:29:14-05:00March 29th, 2021|Categories: Architecture, Culture, Science, Technology|

The internet is like a city; websites are like buildings. In the same way that architecture works in and through the technological design of the building and produces an aesthetic effect, so does web design. Therefore, the websites we visit are forming our souls, not merely by their content, but also through their design. The [...]

Go to Top