Poison Pill

By |2024-02-02T18:01:02-06:00February 2nd, 2024|Categories: Benjamin Lockerd, Catholicism, Sexuality, Timeless Essays|

“Neither she nor anyone else could have imagined how birth control would also contribute to the spread of divorce, infidelity, single parenthood, abortion, and pornography.” This matter-of-fact statement is a welcome acknowledgment of what has become abundantly clear—ready access to contraception has contributed to all of these destructive evils. A synod of Catholic bishops recently [...]

T.S. Eliot: The Light Invisible

By |2024-01-26T05:55:11-06:00January 25th, 2024|Categories: Benjamin Lockerd, Books, Featured, Literature, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

The modern secularist, T.S. Eliot argued, finds meaning either in the brute forces of the physical world or the arbitrary freeplay of the mind or the passing consensus of the human tribe. Looking for meaning in these places has not only led individuals to a sense of nihilism but has led whole nations to slaughter [...]

Liberal Education and Politics: The Case of “The Tempest”

By |2024-01-19T18:06:11-06:00January 19th, 2024|Categories: Benjamin Lockerd, Education, Featured, Liberal Learning, Politics, Timeless Essays, William Shakespeare|

A liberal education is free in the sense that it is free of practical goals. We study our language and our literature or biology and chemistry and psychology just because it is a human instinct to do so, and because it is enjoyable to do so. Everything is Political Just as I began my college [...]

The End of Literature

By |2024-01-10T18:21:33-06:00January 10th, 2024|Categories: Benjamin Lockerd, Edmund Burke, Education, Featured, Liberal Learning, Timeless Essays|

There have been theories about literature nearly as long as there has been literature, beginning with Plato and Aristotle. But the ancient theorists all assumed that they were thinking about something that had its own functions and ends, which they might help to explain. When the new professors think of theory it is exclusively more [...]

Permanent Things: T.S. Eliot’s Conservatism

By |2024-01-03T21:50:31-06:00January 3rd, 2024|Categories: Benjamin Lockerd, Conservatism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays|

T.S. Eliot’s conservatism is “pre-political,” offering no simple formula for the modern polity. He reminds us that even if we could have our way in the political arena we would be unable to create a perfect society, given our own fallen nature. Such a wise mixture of hope and humility is what can keep conservatism [...]

The Faith of Men of Let­ters

By |2023-08-09T15:25:44-05:00August 9th, 2023|Categories: Benjamin Lockerd, Books, George A. Panichas, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

T.S. Eliot cer­tainly pos­sessed cre­ative courage, but he also pos­sessed, as Russell Kirk demon­strates bet­ter than any other com­men­ta­tor, a con­sum­mate spir­i­tual courage. This con­flu­ence of cre­ative and spir­i­tual courage fi­nally per­mits Eliot to at­tain his great­est vi­sion­ary mo­ment in his com­po­si­tion of "Four Quar­tets." Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in [...]

Educating the Moral Imagination: The Truth of Beauty

By |2023-03-13T15:25:16-05:00March 13th, 2023|Categories: Beauty, Benjamin Lockerd, Essential, Imagination, Literature, Moral Imagination, Poetry, Timeless Essays|

Moral imagination is capable of grasping truth and goodness in ways that move us passionately to live in those objective realities. The answers to the errors of modern times need to be given in philosophy and theology, but it is essential that we also experience the truth imaginatively. Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that [...]

A People Without History: T.S. Eliot’s Critique of Evolutionary History

By |2022-08-21T15:07:55-05:00August 21st, 2022|Categories: Benjamin Lockerd, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, History, Poetry, Senior Contributors, T.S. Eliot, The Imaginative Conservative, Timeless Essays|

H.G. Wells sought to free humanity from the “bondage” of tradition, but T.S. Eliot saw history not as an evolutionary movement, but a return to the past. While T.S. Eliot never made any comments critical of Charles Darwin or his theory of the evolution of species, he was quite critical of various popularized versions of [...]

T.S. Eliot & Christopher Dawson on Religion and Culture

By |2023-10-12T05:23:23-05:00January 6th, 2022|Categories: Benjamin Lockerd, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Culture, Featured, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays|

Eliot scholars have ignored the Dawson connection. The central claim Dawson and Eliot made, based on their wide-ranging knowledge of anthropology and history, was that every culture has a cult, some religious system that serves as an ultimate source of value and meaning. “Eliot’s reputation as a critic of society has been worse than his [...]

The Truth of Beauty: Educating the Moral Imagination

By |2023-03-13T15:21:51-05:00March 13th, 2020|Categories: Beauty, Benjamin Lockerd, C.S. Lewis, Russell Kirk, Senior Contributors, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays, Truth|

The answers to the errors of modern times need to be given in philosophy and theology, but it is essential that we also experience the truth imaginatively. Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. —Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” These famous lines of Keats [...]

Political Illiteracy: Jim Wallis and “God’s Politics”

By |2019-11-08T16:01:14-06:00January 25th, 2019|Categories: Abortion, Benjamin Lockerd, Liberalism, Politics, Religion, Theology|

Jim Wallis is an intelligent and sincere person, someone worth listening to on serious subjects. But he appears to be politically illiterate. There is simply no engagement with serious conservative political writers—no hint that he knows such people even exist. This is typical of many intelligent and well-informed people on the Left... One of my [...]

The New Face of the Democratic Donkey: Eeyore

By |2018-11-09T12:12:10-06:00November 4th, 2018|Categories: Benjamin Lockerd, Government, Liberalism, Politics, Senior Contributors|

I have noticed that my liberal friends have been very depressed lately. I used to think that my conservative pals and I were the ones who were constantly bemoaning the decline of Western civilization, but we just can’t match the moaning of our left-wing acquaintances in the time of Trump. […]

The Road to Unfreedom

By |2020-07-07T10:14:11-05:00October 10th, 2018|Categories: American Republic, Benjamin Lockerd, Books, Government, Ideology, Political Philosophy, Senior Contributors|

After the shock of the 2016 election, liberals got a civics lesson on the electoral college established by the Constitution, and they didn’t like it. In "The Road to Unfreedom," Timothy Snyder speaks for them in bemoaning the fact that the founders created not a direct democracy but a republic. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, [...]

Enemies of the Permanent Things

By |2021-05-27T12:50:01-05:00January 14th, 2018|Categories: Benjamin Lockerd, Books, Civil Society, Conservatism, Culture, History, Literature, Permanent Things, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, Tradition|

The necessity of personal morality in a thriving community is denied by the enemies of the permanent things, who do not believe that there are permanent standards of behavior or indeed an unchanging human nature, and who seek to create political systems that will make everyone happy without much effort. Enemies of the Permanent Things: [...]

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