Rosary College is the first-ever college in South Carolina to offer a tradition-oriented education in the Catholic tradition. Apart from offering affordable college-level education for local students, the college will also offer its courses online, enabling students to enroll from anywhere in the world. Father Dwight Longenecker needs no introduction to readers of The Imaginative Conservative. He has written for TIC for many years. His essays are always engaging and thought-provoking and always worth reading. I am blessed to have Father Dwight as a friend. He and I go back many years, from t ..read more

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. This essay was originally delivered as an address to Dartmouth College in 1843.  You have invited me, and I have very willingly accepted your invitation, to address you on this anniversary occasion, which must be to you one of no ordinary interest. I say, to you, for the recollections and associ ..read more

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 Delba Winthrop and Harvey Mansfield entitled “Tocqueville’s Machiavellianism.” I have no idea how open it is to the public or whether it’s sold out. But here’s a taste of what I’m going to say. Let me know if it stinks, because there’s still time for change you can believe in: So Tocqueville wrote wit ..read more

A satirical comedy opens our eyes to ourselves and our society, and in laughing at our foibles, foolishness, and failures, we will also see the serious side, the dangerous implications of our idiocy. In Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, the character Betty Higden compliments her child Sloppy who reads the newspaper to her. She says, “And I do love a newspaper. You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the police in different voices.” T.S. Eliot chose Betty’s quip about Sloppy as a subtitle for two sections of The Waste Land—a detail that fell to Ezra Pou ..read more

In one of his last writings, Pope Benedict XVI afforded a key insight into the conservative ideal. Though he was writing as a Catholic about Catholic problems, the late pope’s reflections are truly universal. Speaking directly to the sexual abuse crisis that reached fever pitch during his pontificate, Benedict observes: “The crisis caused by the many cases of clerical abuse drives us to regard the Church as a failure, which we must now decisively take into our own hands and redesign from the ground up.” This, he warns, is dangerous. If the Church can be “redesigned from the ground up,” it cann ..read more

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 priests did not go so far as to declare independence in the religious sphere as the American patriots did in the political realm. Doing so would have obliterated their identity as Catholics. To the contrary, Carroll would always prove himsel ..read more

No survey of contemporary literature can call itself complete today which ignores Catholic literature. And this not only because of the promise it holds out for a complete renovation of the arts, but also because of its many distinguished writers and its not inconsiderable critical and creative work in all departments of literature. The Catholic Literary Revival, by Calvert Alexander, S.J. (368 pages, Cluny Media) The history of the Catholic Revival during the past three or four generations presents a number of sharp contrasts such as this, which to those who have not followed its developmen ..read more

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 in the forms and structures that make up a civilized life. Studying theology at university, I was particularly drawn to Christology, the study of the nature, person, and attributes of the Lord Jesus—both in his relation to the Heavenly Father and in r ..read more

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 Declaration of Independence: Translucent Poetry by Eva Brann Thomas Jefferson & the American Declaration of Independence by Ross Lence Thomas Jefferson ..read more

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 the inconvenient facets of Jefferson’s complex career. At times pundits—even conservatives—treat Thomas Jefferson as if his whole legacy were reducible to the phrase “all men are created equal.” And admittedly, Jefferson’s ..read more