Clearly, after God, it is to Monica his mother that Augustine owes everything. And he heaps upon every memory he has of her, of the great goodness of her life and example, all possible praise. It has long been a commonplace among commentators of the Confessions that the first nine books are about Augustine’s ardent search for truth, [...]| The Imaginative Conservative
Augustine passed on to us, and all posterity, prescient words of wisdom: that even in the most disconcerting and dark of times, beauty, compassion, truth, love, and happiness abound. When the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410, the city that had taken the world captive had fallen into captivity. The event was a transformative moment in [...]| The Imaginative Conservative
Grief is a gift, not given for its own sake, but to lead us to an ever-deeper peace. It’s often said that saints beget saints. August 27th the Church honors Saint Monica, and the 28th Saint Augustine, her son. But what we now celebrate in joy Monica first sought with tears, with sorrow that begot [...]| The Imaginative Conservative
Critical theorists seek to confuse concepts through the manipulation of language and promote ideas that fail to correspond to reality. Academic theories designed to confuse rather than to clarify must be confronted with calm reason. This is the most charitable thing we can do for those who will come after us. Self-evident Truths It can [...]| The Imaginative Conservative
Salena Zito's new book is less the story of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, than it is the lengthier story of the 2024 campaign for the presidency. As such, it is also the story of the fight for a piece of America’s heartland, and for a key element of Mr. Trump's [...]| The Imaginative Conservative
It is an intimate art, the translation business. But it is the art of creatures like we humans, who live always on the border of matter and spirit, trying to marry together the infinite and the finite, the spiritual and the earthly, the eternal and the temporal. On January 11, 1940, the Italian writer and [...]| The Imaginative Conservative
When it comes to considering America’s greatest writers, it would be foolish to ignore Willa Cather as a contender. Indeed, it is quite possible that her 1925 novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop is the great American novel, rivaling anything that came before or since. Yet, Cather was consistent. While not at the level of Death Comes, her 1913 O Pioneers and [...]| The Imaginative Conservative
AI pronouncements mine our natural hope for an impersonal truth, not by outlasting man like granite, but by appearing to not need him at all. In truth, however, we make the word-collating machines, they feed on our words, and we intervene into their operations in order to produce correct and pleasing results. But in appearance, [...]| The Imaginative Conservative
By prayer, I do not just mean saying prayers or performing prayers of obligation but practising the deep prayer that leads onward beyond first beginnings into the mystic way. It is only here that we will come to know and experience the love that surpasses the understanding. When the constitution on the liturgy was promulgated [...]| The Imaginative Conservative
Russell Hittinger’s new book "On the Dignity of Society" articulates Catholic principles regarding the social order. One of the great themes of the book was the continuity between man’s nature and society. On the Dignity of Society by F. Russell Hittinger Is the history of philosophy full of philosophers rejecting past philosophers? Broadly, this may be [...]| The Imaginative Conservative
No piece of classical music grips my ballet-dancer’s imagination like Aram Khachaturian’s “Waltz” from his Masquerade suite. Like his Piano Concerto that I wrote about HERE in 2017, it doesn’t start so much as drop the listener smack into a musical extravaganza, where the lines between listener and music have been erased and, oh Lord, I’m inside it and [...]| The Imaginative Conservative
There can be little doubt that of the nine books set down to describe Augustine’s life, Book VIII is everyone’s favorite. It is the centerpiece of the story, the necessary hinge on which all the action turns. Not the least of the many astonishing things to be said about Augustine is the fact that it should [...]| The Imaginative Conservative
In Evangeline's quest of the Bride for the Bridegroom, of the lover for her true beloved, we are reminded of the soul’s quest for Christ, who is the Bridegroom of all bridegrooms. The figure of Evangeline Bellefontaine is as elusive as the figure of Gabriel Lajeunesse, the man to whom she was betrothed and whom [...]| The Imaginative Conservative
We are so accustomed to regarding the fine arts as simply a means to pursue or attain the beautiful in the abstract, that we forget that for long centuries there was a close connection between the arts and some public purpose... (essay by Thomas Storck)| The Imaginative Conservative
Only by recognizing the divine mystery that predicates existence in the world can one reclaim his individuality. Only then will he be capable of searching for meaning generated outside the human intellect. Humans can never be gods, but they need God to live meaningful lives. (essay by John Gist)| The Imaginative Conservative
A look at four more unsung heroes from the Australian continent, including the great Frank Sheed! (essay by Joseph Pearce)| The Imaginative Conservative
John Plunkett defended the dignity of the natives of Australia; Caroline Chisholm defended the dignity of vulnerable immigrants to Australia. In doing so, they offer a living witness to the Lord’s commandment that we love our neighbors. (essay by Joseph Pearce)| The Imaginative Conservative
The founding of nations always involves a willful forgetting and subsequent divinization of the founding fathers. The Scriptures are an acid that dissolves every attempt to produce an untainted origin story, and so a new nation. (essay by Marc Barnes)| The Imaginative Conservative
Tacitus was one of the most cited of all historians in Colonial North America. The American colonists thought the world of him, and no one admired him as much as did Thomas Jefferson. (essay by Bradley Birzer)| The Imaginative Conservative
Beauty has an important place in the central activities of Catholic education. Learning requires discipline but deep down is a feast for the mind and heart. (essay by Andrew Seeley)| The Imaginative Conservative
Great Unsung Composers of Christendom| The Imaginative Conservative
Blessed Otto Neururer would be the first priest to be martyred by the Nazis but by no means the last. (essay by Joseph Pearce)| The Imaginative Conservative
Franz Jägerstätter and Fr. Gabriel Gay are two lesser-known victims of the Nazis. May their prayers deliver Europe from the wolves of secularism and restore the European nations to the Faith which forged them. (essay by Joseph Pearce)| The Imaginative Conservative
All nations need reminders that even their best ideals, though worth defending, do not earn them chosen nation status. Reading C.S. Lewis’ "That Hideous Strength" and Langston Hughes' “Let America Be America Again” in light of each other could rouse those in need of both a restoration of confidence in the goodness of the American dream and a renewal of national humility. (essay by Bethany Getz)| The Imaginative Conservative
The tiresome cant about the work ethic notwithstanding, Americans do not celebrate, or even recognize, the dignity of labor. Although they profess to disdain both the idle rich and the idle poor, they do not at the same time esteem those who must work for a living, even as most count themselves among that number. (essay by Mark Malvasi)| The Imaginative Conservative
There is dignity and value in work. You who live in America once knew this. You did not think lesser of a man because he got his hands dirty with honest toil. To the contrary, you thought it a grand thing to build and to create. But all that has changed. (imaginative letter from Homer by Louis Markos)| The Imaginative Conservative
Shall we venture to make a meditation on the love of God? Such a vital subject, for where should we be, if God didn’t love us? And what use are we, if we don’t love God? And yet a difficult subject, terribly difficult. (essay by Ronald Knox)| The Imaginative Conservative
As we dispense with religious institutions, beliefs, and practices—as we dispense with God Himself in the ridiculous belief that we are enough on our own—we leave ourselves open to barbarism within and a more overt barbarism from without. (essay by Bruce Frohnen)| The Imaginative Conservative
The Enlightenment may well be the end of an old story rather than the beginning of a new one. The philosophy of insatiable appetites changed the Christian-Aristotelian moral order into the modern world, but now that the change is just about complete, what purpose does its catalyst serve? (essay by Daniel McCarthy)| The Imaginative Conservative
In our journey of liberal learning, we will, both students and teachers, find ourselves in the presence of the goodness of truth and the beauty of being. We will linger there in that presence, contemplating, knowing that this goodness of truth and this beauty of being is a reflection of the One who is Being itself. (address by George Harne)| The Imaginative Conservative
For Dawson and Kirk, St. Augustine served as both the lodestar in confronting the evils of the world and as a means by which the modern traditionalist should navigate in turbulent ideological waters. (essay by Bradley Birzer)| The Imaginative Conservative
Few popes have lived in more perilous times than Pius XI and fewer still have shown as much courage in the midst of peril. (essay by Joseph Pearce)| The Imaginative Conservative
When trying to understand Scripture, we need to establish an analysis of concrete terms. But if we aren’t careful, we just might explain away the beauty of descriptive language in the Bible. Saint Augustine of Hippo encountered the same issue, and not just among his youngest students. (essay by Christine Norvell)| The Imaginative Conservative
No work of Christian theology has left such an impact on the world and biblical interpretation and understanding as St. Augustine’s "City of God." We who read the Bible do so, often unknowingly, through the eyes of the bishop of Hippo. (essay by Paul Krause)| The Imaginative Conservative
Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov—one of the most exotic Russian converts to Catholicism—was marked from childhood by a strange and controversial spiritual experience: the mystical vision of the divine Sophia. With a personal revelation of such magnitude at the core of his thinking, he became one of those rare philosophers for whom philosophy is truly a “love-for-Wisdom.” (essay by Robert Lazu Kmita)| The Imaginative Conservative
Was Albert Jay Nock correct in saying that the educated man is a superfluous man in modern society? (essay by Bradley J. Birzer)| The Imaginative Conservative
Surely it is a noble desire to try to create a heaven on earth, to make a paradise in this valley of tears, but that is an end that ultimately requires the denial of the reality of human existence. We are fallen, we are mortal, we are not meant to end in perfecting this created world that begins to decay at first touch. (essay by Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg)| The Imaginative Conservative
In Mary’s body, we see the total gift of God’s grace in raising and glorifying our lowly bodies to that “lofty goal” unattainable by our own efforts. All the evil which eats up our bodies—our diseases, discomforts, lusts, and addictions—will be trampled upon not by abandoning the body, but by glorifying it. (essay by Bro. Thomas Nee)| The Imaginative Conservative
One comes away from reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's book wishing that she might have expressed a doubt or two about the efficacy of this or that New Frontier/Great Society domestic initiative. But it is clear that the author has no doubts about the goodness of her country. (essay by Chuck Chalberg)| The Imaginative Conservative
Liberty is not the right to do whatever I please, nor is liberty the necessity of doing whatever the dictator dictates; rather liberty is the right to do what I ought. Furthermore, “ought” is intrinsically related to purpose. The best way of finding out why a thing was made is to go to its maker. “Why did God make you?” (essay by Rev. Fulton Sheen)| The Imaginative Conservative
There is a mystery at the heart of "The Lord of the Rings" that continues to baffle and confuse the critics. Is it “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work,” as author J.R.R. Tolkien claimed in a letter, or is it, as he claimed elsewhere, devoid of any intentional meaning or message? (essay by Joseph Pearce)| The Imaginative Conservative
It is surprising that contemporary political thinking has paid relatively scant attention to St. Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo... (essay by John P. East)| The Imaginative Conservative
To what extent are literary epics the children of their own times, expressions of their own particular zeitgeist, and to what extent are they expressions of perennial truths that transcend fads, fashions and other temporal ephemera? Considering the epics of Homer and Virgil will enable us to understand these questions and to move towards answering them. (essay by Joseph Pearce)| The Imaginative Conservative
