How Would Christopher Dawson Redeem the West?

By |2023-10-12T05:16:04-05:00October 11th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Christendom, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, St. John Henry Newman, Timeless Essays, Western Civilization|

Christopher Dawson held that the Christian religion created a distinctive culture that not only preceded, but has continued long after, the thirteenth century. It is only by examining this cultural dynamism that one can appreciate why modern society is a mutilated, or a “secularized,” version of Christendom. Soren Kierkegaard observed that a distinguishing mark of [...]

Discovering the Truth Through Holiness and Beauty

By |2023-10-04T17:26:14-05:00October 4th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Christopher Dawson, David Deavel, Education, Liberal Learning, Senior Contributors|

If we want to win souls for Christ, we must touch their imaginations. Christopher Dawson’s idea of teaching Christian culture was certainly consistent with that idea of facts, events, history, and description. The adventure, the romance, and the beauty of the story of the Body of Christ after Pentecost shows the splendor of the truth [...]

Leviathan, Inc.: Robert Nisbet & the Modern Nation-State

By |2023-09-29T17:48:04-05:00September 29th, 2023|Categories: Alexis de Tocqueville, American Republic, Bradley J. Birzer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robert Nisbet, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, Western Civilization|

Robert Nisbet feared that modern totalitarians had succeeded in undermining the very foundations of goodness, truth, and morality. They had not only redefined liberty as power, but they had transformed the modern political state into a secular church, exchanging real religion for civic religion, creating a “New Leviathan.” Like most Americans during the Great Depression, [...]

William Faulkner’s Last Words & the American Dilemma

By |2023-09-24T14:40:44-05:00September 24th, 2023|Categories: Equality, Liberty, M. E. Bradford, Rhetoric, Timeless Essays|

The lesson of William Faulkner’s “Gold Medal” speech is both in the teaching it offers and in the method we must employ to grasp that meaning. It is a work of politi­cal imagination, drawing its rhetoric from the same fountainhead as poetry. The Summer of 1971, we Americans were removed by only half a decade from [...]

Should Beauty Have a Purpose?

By |2023-09-15T19:49:21-05:00September 14th, 2023|Categories: Art, Books, Culture, Featured, Literature, Philosophy, St. Thomas Aquinas, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays|

The love of beauty as such is one of the things that can attract men to the God who is infinitely beautiful. But is it the case that we ought to pursue beauty only to the extent that it is joined to some function? A previous essay of mine published in this journal made passing reference [...]

The Sociological Roots of Robert Nisbet’s Conservatism

By |2023-09-05T17:33:11-05:00September 5th, 2023|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Conservatism, Robert Nisbet, Senior Contributors, The Imaginative Conservative, Timeless Essays|

Robert A. Nisbet rooted his eleven ideas of conservatism in contributions from sociology as an academic discipline. Sociology, in contrast to liberalism and radicalism, had merely focused on the aspect of being social and had thus best reflected the more obscure aspects of nineteenth-century conservatism. That conservatism, though, reflected some of the most important concerns [...]

“Besieged”: The Saints—the Aristocrats of the Soul

By |2023-09-02T15:34:04-05:00September 2nd, 2023|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Catholicism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, History, Senior Contributors, Western Civilization|

The saints have served as the heroes in Western culture, and have been the impetus for renewal in the Western Tradition. God has called them, and they, by responding to His call, have become the aristocrats of the soul. Christopher Dawson, the brilliant Anglo-Welsh Roman Catholic historian of the twentieth century, argued that understanding the [...]

A Requiem for Manners

By |2023-08-30T17:46:50-05:00August 30th, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Conservatism, Culture, Edmund Burke, History, Robert E. Lee, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Timeless Essays, Virtue|

Today the idea that the cultivation of manners should be an essential part of one’s education has been lost almost entirely. Proof of the demise of manners is all around us, and thus one of the main pillars of civilization is crumbling before us. On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee met General Ulysses [...]

The Dilemma of the Conservative Artist

By |2023-08-17T17:54:16-05:00August 17th, 2023|Categories: Art, Beauty, Conservatism, Featured, Literature, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays|

Unless we conservatives make an effort to engage in a sustained and regular way with all legitimate developments of the artistic tradition, we will contribute not to the preservation of the tradition but to its ossification into a relic of the past, admired by an increasingly marginalized subculture. Ask a conservative why conservatives tend to [...]

Irving Babbitt & Richard Weaver: Conservative Sages

By |2023-08-16T18:07:14-05:00August 16th, 2023|Categories: Character, Conservatism, Culture, Featured, George A. Panichas, Irving Babbitt, Order, Richard Weaver, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

Moral indolence and apathy, both Babbitt and Weaver stress, must be surpassed if one is to fly beyond the nets of naturalism and temperamental excesses. Character and Culture: Essays on East and West, by Irving Babbitt, with a new Introduction by Claes G. Ryn Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time, by Richard [...]

Edmund Burke & the English Revolution

By |2023-08-15T18:01:08-05:00August 15th, 2023|Categories: Community, Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Revolution, Timeless Essays|Tags: , |

In his “Reflections,” Edmund Burke constructs a powerful myth of English history, defending the consolidated results of the English Revolution of the seventeenth century. In his poem “Blood and the Moon,” Yeats writes of “haughtier-headed Burke that proved the state a tree.” Edmund Burke would have relished the line, having proved nothing of the sort. [...]

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 [...]

Richard Weaver, the Gospel, & the Restoration of Culture

By |2023-10-08T19:42:04-05:00July 31st, 2023|Categories: Bible, Bradley G. Green, Culture, Richard Weaver, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

Richard Weaver desired to “restore culture,” and countless twentieth and twenty-first century pilgrims have been helped by his wisdom. Many have certainly moved from despair to hope (or from naïve utopianism to a more profound hopefulness) because of Weaver. But to restore “culture” means of course to restore persons. Somewhere along the way, many twentieth-century pilgrims [...]

John Dryden: The Politics of Style

By |2023-07-18T14:17:32-05:00July 18th, 2023|Categories: Art, Conservatism, Culture, Order, Poetry, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays|Tags: , |

John Dryden was, for the most part, a man of quiet temperament; yet he presided over a literary revolution. As a poet and critic he destroyed the principal seventeenth-century literary modes and created the style and the methods that would characterize the eighteenth. The rise in John Dryden’s reputation, commencing a generation or so ago, [...]

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