Can we imagine that a good and loving God would allow the presence, in a world degraded due to human sin, of other rational beings who would have suffered, although innocent, its consequences? Formulated around 1950, the paradox bearing the name of Enrico Fermi was sparked by a rhetorical question: why haven’t we encountered intelligent life in the universe? I say “rhetorical” because this question assumes that, unquestionably, little green men exist somewhere, lost in the vastness of galactic space. Or, even if this possibility is not necessarily absolutely certain, many still believe that ..read more

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 Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions are not beyond all conjecture. –SIR THOMAS BROWNE, Urn-Burial. THE mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We ..read more

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 begin. Dawson begins his history in the third century, with the Diocletian restoration and persecution, then traces the twilight of Late Antiquity, the many migratory shocks, and finally the eight century recovery under Charlemagne ..read more

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 American self-government. The succeeding years saw a series of political crises provoked by the king and parliament. What turned the political dispute into a war was arms confiscation at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, on April 19, 1775. In 1774, the Brit ..read more

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 aloft in the belfry-arch Of the North-Church-tower, as a signal-light, — One if by land, and two if by sea; And I on the opposite shore will be, Ready to ride and spread the alarm Through every Middlesex village and farm, For the country-folk to be up and to arm.” Then he climbed to the tower of the church, Up ..read more

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