What John Henry Newman says about conscience shocks the modern secular sensibility, which treats it (if at all) as the “socially constructed” result of any number of cultural influences. The conscience is a messenger from God: giving saints courage to resist tyranny, even unto death. by Emmeline Deane, oil on canvas, 1889 The [...]
Rules are good things to have. We need to learn not to wipe our noses on our sleeves, not to take stuff that isn’t ours, not to scream at people when we’re debating them on television, not to shout abuse at politicians even if they deserve it. But as useful as rules like that can [...]
The beauty of fairy tales is their ability to attractively depict character and virtue. Goodness glimmers while wickedness and deception are unmasked. Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Vigen Guroian as he explores the benefits fairy tales afford children. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher The notion that fairy tales [...]
For Russell Kirk, the "ghost tale" may better communicate certain truths when compared to science fiction. His was no Enlightenment mind, Kirk now became aware; it was a Gothic mind, medieval in its temper and structure. —Russell Kirk, The Sword of Imagination As J.R.R. Tolkien assisted many with his most informative essay, On Fairy Stories, [...]
It’s usually only the rationalists and skeptics who find their way into the great surveys of thought. But religion always rises from the ashes. This is thanks in no small part to the imaginative thinkers who revealed Christianity as what it always was, although not always ideally expressed by us: a thing of mystery, romance, [...]
There must be places like Mecosta, hidden away from the world, where people can repair to ponder and consider the permanent things that matter. The course of rivers is often marked by rapids, which reflect excitement, dynamism and raw power. While rapids can be exhilarating, there is also a place for river pools and backwaters, [...]
Alexander Solzhenitsyn illuminates the distinctive character of our age by bringing to bear a religiously grounded moral vision, and he filters this vision through his literary imagination. In the summer of 2003, I had to vacate my college office. With limited file-cabinet space at home, I had to lighten my files drastically. Reading and skimming [...]
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 [...]
Edmund Burke believed that one must see the human being not for what he is, or the worst that is within him, but rather as clothed in the “wardrobe of moral imagination,” a glimpse of what the person could be and is, by God, meant to be. Though we correctly remember Edmund Burke as the [...]
At a time when a child should be exposed to wonder, awe, play, and fairy stories, the STEM brigade tells us we should instead prepare children for careers in engineering and the sciences. My mother-in-law, a wonderful grandmother and award-winning artist to boot, is fond of buying my nine-year-old daughter STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) [...]
Russell and Annette Kirk with the author Driving across the snowy landscape of Michigan the day after Christmas in 1973, I was somewhat apprehensive. I had been invited to take part in the first seminar of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in the ancestral home of Dr. Russell Kirk at Piety Hill. We were [...]
Graham Greene classified his 1958 novel "Our Man in Havana" as one of his lighter pieces or “entertainments,” yet which allows for a surprising amount of spiritual substance. “The moral imagination is… man’s power to perceive ethical truth, abiding law, in the seeming chaos of many events.” –Russell Kirk In his book The Catholic Writer [...]
The apologist should appeal not only to one’s reason and intellect but also to one’s imagination, wooing the unbeliever—or a believer who has only granted intellectual consent rather than full-heart surrender—to Christ. In answer to the question “[w]hy did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about [...]
For the conservative Benjamin Disraeli, the answers to the political problems of the present lie in the restoration of the ideals of the past. Restoration is not an attempt to reject the present and escape or return to an earlier state of a society; it is rather a creative, imaginative effort to infuse the present [...]