“Yet just as there is right and wrong, there are good stories and bad stories. Stories not only reflect life, they shape it. It is of no small account what stories we tell and what stories we live by” (Vigen Guroian, Rallying the Really Human Things, p. 61).
Moral Imagination
“If that is the imagination, what is the moral imagination? The eighteenth century British statesman Edmund Burke first coined the term in his great work Reflections on the Revolution in France . . . The moral imagination is the distinctively human power to conceive of men and women as moral beings . . . Modern …
For Good or Ill, Imagination Rules the World
“The human heart’s desires may not be holy, and the imagination born of these unholy desires may even be demonic. After all, it was the tyrant Napoleon who hauntingly declared, ‘Imagination rules the world’ . . . Where there is no real moral imagination, itself a form of vision, the people will become captives of …
Grace or Law?
“A vision of the good has far greater power to move men and women to do the right thing than all the horrible images we may conjure up to terrify them into doing it” (Vigen Guroian, Rallying the Really Human Things, p. 10).
Not Called Limousine Liberals for Nothing
“The first duty of the modern intellectual, wrote George Orwell, is to state the obvious, to puncture ‘the smelly little orthodoxies . . . now contending for our souls..’ Orwell meant by these the totalitarian doctrines that mesmerized the intellectuals of his time and that prevented them from accepting the most obvious and evident truths …
Green Lament for Sale at Wal Mart
I recently heard the new Eagles album was pretty good, and so I went and looked on iTunes for it. Nothing. A day or so later, I popped into a small record store downtown to ask about it, and the gentleman from the sixties running that place said, yes, it was in fact out, but …
Our Very Own Massive Contradiction
“No doubt future social historians will find the contradiction between our concern about sexual abuse, on the one hand, and our connivance at and indifference to precocious sexual activity, on the other, as curious as we find the contrast between Victorian sexual prudery and the vast size of the Victorian demimonde” (Theodore Dalrymple, Life at …
Which Explains a Lot
“The architects thought that modernity was a value that transcended all other virtues; they thought they could wake the country from its nostalgic slumber, dragging it into the twentieth century by pouring what seemed to them the most modern of building materials—reinforced concrete—all over it” (Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom, p. 146).
The Poor Are a Gold Mine
“Indeed, homelessness is the source of employment for not negligible numbers of the middle classes. The poor, wrote a sixteenth-century German bishop, are a gold mine; and so, it turns out, are the homeless. For example, in one hostel for the homeless that I visited, located in a rather grand but disused and deconsecrated Victorian …
Feeling Good About Behaving Badly
“This is the lie that is at the heart of our society, the lie that encourages every form of destructive self-indulgence to flourish: for while we ascribe our conduct to pressures from without, we obey the whims that well up from within, thereby awarding ourselves carte blanche to behave as we choose. Thus we feel …