Between ingenuity and the analytic ability there exists a difference far greater, indeed, than that between the fancy and the imagination, but of a character very strictly analogous. It will found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic. What song the Syrens sang, or what name [...]
We have no way of knowing whether the twenty-first-century collapse is yet another momentary stumble or finally the Dark Age. Like good Carolingians, however, we keep looking backwards for our recovery, trying to rebuild what we once had. Christopher Dawson’s prophetic The Making of Europe (1932) ends where the Gentle Reader might expect such a book to [...]
During the first six decades of the eighteenth century, the American colonies were mostly allowed to govern themselves. In exchange, they loyally fought for Great Britain in imperial wars against the French and Spanish. But in 1763, after the British and Americans won the French and Indian War, King George III began working to eliminate [...]
Listen, my children, and you shall hear Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five: Hardly a man is now alive Who remembers that famous day and year. He said to his friend, — "If the British march By land or sea from the town to-night, Hang a lantern [...]
The end of the scholar is not to be a scholar; but a man, doing that which cannot be done without scholarship. The end is never the production of a work of art, however grand in conception, successful in execution, or exquisite in finish; but the realization of a good to which art is subsidiary. [...]
Tocqueville was not a philosopher in the classic sense; he thought of himself as unfortunate not to believe in the promises of the personal God of the Bible. He didn’t think he, as a thinker, had a natural right not to believe. I’m giving some comments in Boston in response to a great essay by [...]
In making a case for the property rights of the American clergy, Bishop John Carroll made a revolutionary case for the nature of the American Church’s relationship with Rome. In these United States our Religious system has undergone a revolution, if possible, more extraordinary than our political one. —John Carroll, 1783 John Carroll and his fellow [...]
One of the most astonishing aspects of the Incarnation mystery is that Christ, while being “God from God, Light from Light,” can withal be spoken of as a human being among human beings. In studying Jesus’ personality, background, concerns, and interests, we touch divinity itself, and learn something of divinity’s plan for humanity as expressed [...]
Here are recommended essays regarding Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826) on The Imaginative Conservative: Looking for Mr. Jefferson by Clyde Wilson Thomas Jefferson’s Birthday by Clyde Wilson The Jeffersonian Conservative Tradition by Clyde Wilson Thomas Jefferson, Conservative by Clyde Wilson From Union to Empire by W. Winston Elliott III Was Thomas Jefferson a Philosopher? by Eva Brann [...]
The sanitizing of Thomas Jefferson has played a role in the crippling of public discourse. Nowadays, anyone who would discuss something so anodyne as political decentralization or states' rights has to walk on eggshells, lest he find himself attacked and stigmatized by enforcers of political orthodoxy. We should question an American political establishment that obfuscates [...]
Like their British counterparts, the American Jacobites bitterly criticized the damage done to the working class and cities by the industrial system and listening to their neo-feudal critiques one sees similarities with Progressivism and Populism. While these latter movements analyzed from the perspective of the political left, the Jacobites did so from the political right. [...]
One of the more remarkable trends in the past five years in Catholic education is the noticeable increase of schools embracing a “classical education.” Ten or twenty years ago, the Catholic classical school was a start-up by disgruntled laity. Now one can find here and there whole diocesan school systems that have embraced the classical [...]
Even though President Andrew Jackson’s announcement that he was the embodiment of the American people was populist, demagogic, authoritarian, and absolutely in violation of the spirit of the U.S. Constitution, his views on the Second Bank of the United States most certainly embodied the views of the average American. By the end of 1819, so [...]
The poet relies upon on a shared understanding that gives his imagination the oxygen to sustain it. The world lacks certitude about its direction, and we want most of all to awaken the poetic powers urgently necessary for the long rebuilding that lies ahead. For the past month or so, I have been doing daily [...]