Faith and culture are inextricably connected because a culture is always an expression of the faith which informs it.

The Imaginative Conservative

Essays of the Week



Faith and Culture

by Joseph Pearce


In the broadest sense of the word, faith and culture are inextricably connected because a culture is always an expression of the faith which informs it. If a culture is animated by a belief in the triune splendour of the good, the true, and the beautiful, it will shine forth goodness, truth, and beauty. If it is animated by a nihilistic denial of these transcendental foundations it will manifest only viciousness, falsehood, and ugliness. In the former case, the culture cultivates healthy growth in good things; in the latter case it cultivates nothing and destroys everything. The former finds in the faithful fruits of the tree of tradition the seeds of new and renewed cultural expression; the latter pulls the tree of tradition up by the roots, casting its fruit aside, leaving in its place a desert wasteland of deconstructed despair, barren and fruitless, capable of nothing but the sterile sneer of the cynic. The choice is ultimately between faith and culture or the absence of faith and therefore, and in consequence, the absence of culture also. There is no middle path... 

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How Margaret Sanger Tried to Enslave Us All

by Nicole King


Few have noted it, but Margaret Sanger’s arguments for birth control bear some striking parallels to the second-century heresy of Gnosticism, a heresy which of course took many forms over many centuries, but which traces its roots to the belief that through knowledge, or gnosis, man can overcome evil and attain salvation. With a common understanding of the physical body as something to be broken away from, to acquire power over via gnosis, there really was no other conclusion to the question of children: The Gnostics didn’t want them. Man and woman alike are now more enslaved than ever, not as much to the perils of “unwanted childbearing” that Sanger so dreaded, but rather to the perils of their own passions. Of this, we should be very afraid. A nation of citizens enslaved to sexual passion and reaping its full consequences is a nation in grave peril. But the first step to addressing a wrong is to recognize it for what it is. And the first step in mending a nation’s sexual ethic is to recognize its heretical beginnings... 

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The “Wild and Terrible” Mozart

by Stephen Klugewicz


“Too wild and terrible” is what Ludwig van Beethoven is reported to have said about Mozart’s famous Requiem. And despite the popularity of this great, unfinished work, the “wild and terrible” side of Mozart has generally been obscured in the public mind, in favor of his seemingly “lighter” works: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, the overture to Le Nozze Di Figaro, the Flute and Harp Concerto, the “Turkish Rondo.” Of course, even in the seemingly lighter pieces so associated with Mozart, there are depths… and ones that not all listeners will plumb. And this is how Mozart designed it. His music almost always possesses both a surface appeal—lively, melodic, seemingly relatively simple and appealing to the ear—and side that is darker and more complex (both technically and emotionally). In terms of Mozart’s that are not so luminous, where the shadows fall across the listener’s ears, there is of course, the aforementioned Requiem and the penultimate scene of Don Giovanni, as well as the Masonic Funeral Music, and perhaps the darkest, most modern-sounding work Mozart ever composed: the “Adagio and Fugue in C Minor," K. 546... 

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The Quest for Modern Conservatism

by Bradley J. Birzer

When Robert Nisbet first published The Quest for Community in 1953, he did not consciously consider himself a conservative, though he had spent most of his academic career up to that point writing about the formation of associations and communities as understood by French conservatives and French and Russian anarchists. Nisbet warned that the conservative might veer, in his frustration with the modern world, toward a radical individualism or a nationalism. Each, he cited, would result in great evils. Equally dangerous, though, were all forms of modern nationalism and the promotion of a “national community,” no matter how humane or humanistic the propaganda behind either. The job of every conservative, then, is twofold. First, he must fight “tirelessly” against the “centralized, omnicompetent, and unitary state” and all that goes with it: debt as well as empire. Second, he must do everything possible to promote that which makes the free society not just an ordered one, but a good one: the intermediary institutions of family, church, friendship, business, and school... 

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Going Rogue: When Our Courts Join the Democratic Opposition

by Thomas Ascik


With a “clear, plain, and palpable” eagerness to seize control of the Pennsylvania congressional map in time for the 2018 mid-term elections, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has gone beyond judicial activism and joined with the Democrats in their attempt to win control of the U.S. Congress. The details of how this came about and the strategies behind them have not been adequately reported elsewhere. The Pennsylvania case, handed down on January 22, is the fourth “partisan” or “political” gerrymandering case to emerge in the growing trend for the judiciary to take over the drawing of electoral districts. On January 9 of this year, in Common Cause v. Rucho, a federal district court in North Carolina held that the 2010 re-districting map drawn up by the Republican-controlled state legislature and under which Republicans hold 10 of 13 congressional seats was an unconstitutional partisan gerrymand in violation of the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause. The court ordered the legislature to come up with a new map within two weeks... 

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On Studying Imagination

by Eva Brann


Our common experience is that things may be genuine or they may be fake and words can be true or they can be deceitful. Forgeries are perfectly real as things and that’s what makes them hard to discern as forgeries, as counterfeits. False rhetoric is often perfectly good, even especially persuasive as language, and that is what makes it seductive. Thing-imitations are not nothing simply; word falsifications are not non-sense simply: On the contrary, they are potently not what they pretend to be. The Elean stranger, Parmenides’ true progeny, in following the way of thought, can be understood as setting before himself this double “im-passe,” this a-poria: How to hold fast to the real human purveyor of imitations by saving his mere and sometimes false images as somehow real beings. Put ontologically: How to understand images as not being mere nothings? And how to preserve the false character of the sophist-type as an indictable reality. Again, put ontologically: How to understand a deceiver (be he personally innocent by reason of ignorance or deliberately bad because of corruptness) as doing something potent and even crucial to the very being of a world?... 

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The Great Gatsby and the Demoralized Man

Lebanon the Magnificent: An Inquiry into Exile and Terror

Did the Constitution Kill the Common Good?

Russell Kirk on the Moral Imagination

Franz Schubert’s Music of Paradise Lost

Perpetrating a Freud on Sophocles and Shakespeare

William Faulkner’s Last Words & the American Dilemma

What Does the Koran Really Say?

The Profoundly Humane Vision of Groundhog Day

“The Presentation of the Infant Jesus in the Temple”