Should We Celebrate Presidents’ Day, or Washington’s Birthday?

By |2024-02-18T16:09:00-06:00February 18th, 2024|Categories: American Republic, Constitution, George Washington, Gleaves Whitney, Presidency, Timeless Essays|

People ask why a few of us presidential junkies would like to see Presidents’ Day changed back to Washington’s Birthday. The technical explanation has to do with a misguided law called HR 15951 that was passed in 1968 to make federal holidays less complicated. The real answer is simply this: George Washington is our greatest [...]

A Meditation on the Mind & Task of the Christian Humanist

By |2023-08-06T14:04:05-05:00August 6th, 2023|Categories: Christian Humanism, Gleaves Whitney, Timeless Essays|

God makes the cosmos come into being in a series of dramatic contrasts: Creator and creation, being and nothingness, shape and formlessness, heavens and earth, day and night, land and sea, ruler and subject, giver and receiver, work and completion, labor and rest. The Christian humanist understands this: that human beings are not Homo sapiens, [...]

“The Pioneers”: Heroic Settlers & American Ideal

By |2023-07-12T19:28:46-05:00July 12th, 2023|Categories: American Republic, American West, Books, Gleaves Whitney, History, Timeless Essays|

Despite America’s flawed past, despite the fact that previous generations honored some questionable individuals, our history did not unfold solely within the grid of racism. New England pioneers possessed high ideals of justly ordered freedom, and they carried those ideals west, and in “The Pioneers,” David McCullough is on nothing less than a civilizational mission [...]

Gerald Ford: A Republic of Laws, Not of Men

By |2022-02-21T12:34:32-06:00February 20th, 2022|Categories: American Republic, Gleaves Whitney, Presidency, Senior Contributors|

Our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule. But there is a higher Power who ordains not only righteousness but love, not only justice but mercy. President Gerald R. Ford, Remarks at His Swearing-In Ceremony, August 9, 1974 My dear friends, my fellow Americans: The oath that [...]

The Swords of the Imagination: Russell Kirk’s Battle With Modernity

By |2023-09-01T18:38:56-05:00June 2nd, 2021|Categories: Conservatism, Essential, Featured, Gleaves Whitney, Imagination, Modernity, Russell Kirk, Timeless Essays|

“Imagination rules the world,” Russell Kirk used to say.[1] He meant that imagination is a force that molds the clay of our sentiments and understanding.[2] It is not chiefly through calculations, formulas, and syllogisms, but by means of images, myths, and stories that we comprehend our relation to God, to nature, to others, and to the self. [...]

The Joy of the Liberal Arts in a Pandemic World

By |2020-05-04T17:39:38-05:00May 4th, 2020|Categories: Culture, Education, Gleaves Whitney, Liberal Arts, Liberal Learning|

In a crisis, it is best to balance change and continuity. The liberal arts help us do so by embracing both. On the one hand, they are the anchor-in-bedrock that conserves the best of our culture. On the other hand, they are the wind-in-the-sail that powers us to betterment. I. Accelerating Our Experience of Big [...]

How Can We Form a More Perfect Union in Our Fractious Age?

By |2021-04-22T17:38:38-05:00April 12th, 2020|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, Gleaves Whitney, Government, History, Liberal, Politics, Republicans|

From the founding generation to the greatest generation, Americans sought meaning in one or more of the three operating systems that informed Western civilization: Judeo-Christianity, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism. The productive tension among those three operating systems defined the modern age. Three radically different world views—yet we moderns kept them suspended in a three-way polarity. [...]

Homer’s “Odyssey” and What It Means to Be Human

By |2020-05-22T00:16:16-05:00April 4th, 2020|Categories: Books, Gleaves Whitney, Great Books, Greek Epic Poetry, Homer, Imagination, Literature, Odyssey, W. Winston Elliott III|

As we are forced into isolation and confronted by our mortality in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we begin to ask ourselves an important question: What does it mean to be human? Gleaves Whitney, Director of Grand Valley State University’s Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies, and Winston Elliott III, The Imaginative Conservative’s Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, [...]

Is the Current Crisis Really “Unprecedented”?

By |2020-09-04T15:53:46-05:00March 30th, 2020|Categories: American Republic, Coronavirus, Economics, Gleaves Whitney, Politics|

In our age of clickbait and hyperbole, people call things “unprecedented” that are not unprecedented at all. Public officials shamelessly brag that the nation’s recent economic growth is unequaled. (It’s not.) Broadcasters breathlessly report that today’s anxiety over the stock market is unheard of. (Actually the number of suicides after the Crash of 1929 was [...]

The COVID-19 Crisis: The Need to Balance Public Health & Economic Stability

By |2020-03-28T19:24:05-05:00March 28th, 2020|Categories: Coronavirus, Donald Trump, Gleaves Whitney, Presidency|

Who’s right, the public health officials or the economists? That’s the question we are tempted to ask. But in this pandemic, it’s the wrong question. Both sides are right. Franklin D. Roosevelt had his Great Depression. George W. Bush had his Great Recession. And Donald J. Trump has his Great Pandemic. Over the past weeks, [...]

Coronavirus Reveals America’s Mood

By |2020-03-28T19:25:22-05:00March 25th, 2020|Categories: Coronavirus, Culture, Gleaves Whitney, History, Morality|

As coronavirus fatalities multiply these days—as COVID-19 leaves our bodies sick and makes our spirits sick at heart—I find myself asking how similar the mood today is to that of the West during the 1889-1890 flu pandemic. One of the world’s worst plagues occurred in 1889-1890. The so-called Russian flu is of particular interest to [...]

Socrates and Free Government

By |2021-04-22T17:56:29-05:00July 10th, 2019|Categories: Apology, Gleaves Whitney, History, Plato, Socrates, Stephen Tonsor series, Timeless Essays|

A free government is only sustainable if citizens can govern themselves. Socrates patiently revealed, through conversations that held a mirror up to fellow citizens, that they did not sufficiently understand such basic concepts as justice, piety, virtue, truth, and goodness when applied to themselves. Yet they presumed to govern others? Today’s offering in our Timeless [...]

The Fusionist Mind of Stephen Tonsor

By |2019-05-28T23:55:18-05:00May 28th, 2019|Categories: Character, Conservatism, Gleaves Whitney, History, Stephen Tonsor series|

Given that human beings’ aspirations are framed by limitations, there will always be a dynamic tension between God and man, faith and reason, the absolute and relative, the universal and the particular, unity and diversity, Jerusalem and Athens, liberty and order. Though the work is never finished, historian Stephen J. Tonsor III entered into this [...]

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