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 […]
The poet relies upon on a shared understanding that gives his imagination the oxygen to sustain it. The world lacks certitude about its direction, and we want most of all to awaken the poetic powers urgently necessary for the long rebuilding that lies ahead. For the past month or so, I have been doing daily […]
Kate Montclair is dying. She has arrived at late middle age loveless, childless, and having failed to achieve the career dreams of her youth. Now diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, she sees the next fourteen months of suffering as an intolerable prospect. Kate is desperate—not only for a miracle cure, but for some sense […]
Let’s look at themes of resurrection in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” one of the greatest and most popular children’s stories ever written. Almost exactly a year ago, during last year’s Easter Octave, I wrote an essay focusing on themes of resurrection to be found in classic literature. Beginning with Tolkien’s invention of […]
“The Lord of the Rings” is not an allegorical story, nor should it be treated as such, but that does not mean that the story cannot be used to contemplate and plumb the depths of humanity and its relation to the divine. That J.R.R. Tolkien had a great dislike for his works being called “allegories” […]
I enjoyed Peter Jackson’s film version of “The Lord of the Rings” and accept that a film adaptation is just that: an adaptation. However, my objection to the film rests at a more fundamental level: I object because filmic versions of fantasy fiction serve to abolish the imagination. Most Imaginative Conservative readers are fans of […]
As a settler in seventeenth-century New England and as a female poet, Anne Bradstreet was a trailblazer. A progressive female poet, she also took delight in her role as wife and mother, while remaining committed to her conservative Puritan theology and beliefs. Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672) was a pioneer in two ways: She was a pioneering […]
Catholic literature, when we discover it coming into being in the mid-nineteenth century, is a literature of protest against the course being followed by European society. Its writers were not very numerous, nor did the typical Victorian man see any particular significance in their opposition to Liberalism, the anti-intellectual Romantic aesthetic, scientific naturalism, and the […]
In his last moments, Brutus voiced a sentiment about the ultimate tragedy of the virtuous life in those evil days, in which the good was punished and the evil rewarded. This does not make virtue worthless for the individual; it just may place him on the losing side. [E]veryone knows that some young bucks among […]
Through his interpretive method, Mircea Eliade sought to keep open the path of metaphysics, and even mysticism, at a time when secular interpretations of culture—sociological, psychoanalytical, economical, and so forth—triumphantly dominated the scene of the human sciences. An erudite historian of religions and a passionate author of fiction well known in Romania, Mircea Eliade developed […]
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