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 [...]

Revisiting Christopher Dawson on Culture

By |2022-08-04T18:39:19-05:00August 4th, 2022|Categories: Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Christopher Morrissey, Culture, Islam, Rome, Timeless Essays|

The essence of Rome, by being conscious of one’s cultural debts, is the refusal to make a definitive synthesis or mediation. Only in Rome are there Athens and Jerusalem. Only because of Rome are there “two cities because one remains silently present.” Remi Brague’s observation about the historical essence of Rome shows that “Romanity” is [...]

Historical Consciousness & the Roman Road

By |2022-08-01T11:32:21-05:00May 21st, 2017|Categories: Christopher Morrissey, Conservatism, Featured, History, Literature, Poetry, Rome, Timeless Essays|

The Roman Road is nothing less than the royal road of all adult historical consciousness. That road is the way of the imaginative conservative, who does not throw away the all-connecting vision of childhood, and then replace it with another, “more sophisticated” way of thinking. Thomas Hardy’s mother died in 1904 at the age of [...]

Roger Scruton on Architectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism

By |2017-05-19T09:20:45-05:00May 18th, 2017|Categories: Architecture, Art, Beauty, Books, Christopher Morrissey, Culture, Modernity, Roger Scruton|

Without defending the citadel of the mind, how can we build a beautiful city? Without the conviction of true propositions, whence do we think beauty will come?… In Conversations with Roger Scruton (2016), Mark Dooley engages in a fascinating book-length interview with the famous English philosopher. While best known academically for unfashionable arguments on behalf [...]

Truth, Cultural Renewal, and the Benedict Option

By |2017-07-01T09:45:02-05:00May 1st, 2017|Categories: Books, Christianity, Christopher Morrissey, Featured, Truth|

If rights are real, and are founded on reality, then perhaps we should also be skeptical of Rod Dreher’s notion of a “Benedict Option.” Being in the world is a necessary condition for not being of it and for generating a genuine cultural flourishing… No doubt Rod Dreher’s book, The Benedict Option, has Imaginative Conservatives talking about the [...]

Stupid from the Beginning: Meditations on the Banality of Evil

By |2017-05-17T21:14:52-05:00March 29th, 2017|Categories: Books, Christopher Morrissey, Featured|

How is it that the most unremarkable and small-minded stupidity can accomplish evils of such enormous magnitude?... Adolf Eichmann In Eichmann at Jerusalem, the book that collects the articles she wrote for The New Yorker about the 1961 trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt puts forth her arresting thesis [...]

Must Digital Technology Make Enemies of Us All?

By |2019-04-23T16:06:12-05:00March 7th, 2017|Categories: Christopher Morrissey, Culture, Featured, Film, Information Age, Technology, William F. Buckley Jr.|

Given the choice, people would rather watch flat-out conflict and crosstalk rather than a more plodding format of elevated discourse and sober deliberation… The documentary film Best of Enemies (2015) is not just a compelling chronicle and contextualization of the famous 1968 television debates between William F. Buckley, Jr., and Gore Vidal. As the sequence [...]

Being Human in a Digital Age of Light & Darkness

By |2019-06-25T16:56:16-05:00February 18th, 2017|Categories: Christopher Morrissey, Culture, Donald Trump, Featured, Technology|

For anyone to hold “the media” in contempt—for example, over “fake news”—is nothing but a bizarre form of self-loathing… In this digital age of polarized politics, where can we look for guidance on how to turn down the heat? After all, we don’t want to blow ourselves up. Fortunately, although the imperative to use our [...]

Shakespeare: Three Plays About Human Desire

By |2023-04-25T22:36:43-05:00February 4th, 2017|Categories: Christopher Morrissey, Love, William Shakespeare|

When a character imitates the desire of another character, the differences between them dissolve as the similarities in desire increase. This pattern of “undifferentiation” is more and more evident in the plays of the mature Shakespeare, such as “The Taming of the Shrew,” “As You Like It,” and “Twelfth Night. In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s [...]

John Deely: A Philosopher’s Life

By |2017-01-21T10:59:58-06:00January 20th, 2017|Categories: Christopher Morrissey, Philosophy, Reason|

The world lost one of its keenest philosophical minds when John Deely passed away on January 7, 2017. As a philosopher, John developed his insights by working within the fertile soil of the Catholic intellectual tradition. The influence of the great French Thomist Jacques Maritain was immense, not only in John’s professional life, but also [...]

Catullus on Sappho: The Divine Ecstasy of Love

By |2017-01-14T22:45:54-06:00January 14th, 2017|Categories: Christopher Morrissey, Poetry, Senior Contributors|

The Roman poet Catullus translated a masterful love poem by the Greek poet Sappho, adapting it into a Latin version that is neither simply literal nor straightforwardly accurate, but, rather, a brilliant reinterpretation… The Roman poet Catullus translated a masterful love poem by the Greek poet Sappho, adapting it from her Greek (Sappho 31) into [...]

A Holiday Film Festival for Imaginative Conservatives

By |2023-11-25T14:23:57-06:00December 29th, 2016|Categories: Christopher Morrissey, Culture, Film, Star Trek, Superheroes, Whit Stillman|

One way to celebrate the Christmas season and the New Year is to relax with family and friends by coming together around a movie. Here’s a list of suggestions: 1. Rogue One To enjoy this film, you have to go into it realizing that you are not going to see a Star Wars episode. It [...]

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