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Jan 12, 2025 | 
theimaginativeconservative.org | Dwight Longenecker
Jimmy Carter was a nice, good man who epitomized American Christianity’s reduction to Moralistic, Therapeutic Deism. As such, the singing of John Lennon’s atheistic “Imagine”—Carter’s favorite song—at the former president’s funeral was entirely appropriate. Last week at former president Jimmy Carter’s funeral, country singers Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood sang ex-Beatle John Lennon’s song Imagine, and Christian social media erupted in dismay.
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Jan 2, 2025 | 
theimaginativeconservative.org | Dwight Longenecker
What will delight lovers of J.R.R. Tolkien most is the portrait of the man that is drawn in the pages of Holly Ordway’s biography. In the final chapters, she summarizes his life as the extraordinary fleshed out in ordinary. While Tolkien is completing his magnum opus, he is also maintaining the daily routine of husband, father, hardworking academic, and most of all—faithful Catholic layman.
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Dec 15, 2024 | 
theimaginativeconservative.org | Dwight Longenecker
While one might respect the French traditions of haute couture and the artistic avant garde, who thought it was a good idea to mar the otherwise grand reopening of the historic Christian monument of Notre Dame by dressing the clergy in costumes so garishly outlandish? Once when I was living in England, I stood in the supermarket queue behind a young man dressed in the costume of a punk rocker.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
theimaginativeconservative.org | Dwight Longenecker
When your bird reaches the table this Thursday, you can ask your table mates if they know why the bird is called a turkey, and then—if you have read this essay—impress them with your encyclopedic knowledge. You remember the Dad joke at this time of year: “We’re having an international Thanksgiving. Mom’s serving Turkey on her best china.” It turns out that the turkey is a more cosmopolitan bird than we first knew.
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Nov 10, 2024 | 
theimaginativeconservative.org | Dwight Longenecker
The triumph of Donald Trump was simply the triumph of the majority of Americans who saw their society slipping into anarchy and chaos without borders. I hope that in the next Trump years, the renewed, common-sense desire for proper borders in every area of life will prevail and will be balanced by that other great American virtue—the rights of individual freedom.
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Oct 20, 2024 | 
theimaginativeconservative.org | Dwight Longenecker
The issue of women’s ordination is one comparatively minor aspect of the much larger issue of our times: the destruction and distortion of human sexuality and ultimately the destruction and distortion of the human race itself. The ordination of women in the Church of England was the catalyst for my conversion to the Catholic Church in the early 1990s.
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Oct 15, 2024 | 
theimaginativeconservative.org | Dwight Longenecker
Popular culture is awash with the horror genre. Television shows, video games, movies and literature on the occult gush forth seeming to make the ironic point that the more our society becomes scientifically secular the more appetite there is for the supernatural. It seems impossible to avoid the tsunami of paranormal investigators, zombies, vampires and their vamps or invasions of the living dead.
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Sep 28, 2024 | 
theimaginativeconservative.org | Dwight Longenecker
Could the life of St Galgano be linked to the Arthurian legend of the Sword in the Stone? In an earlier essay for The Imaginative Conservative, I recounted my discovery of the famous “Sword of St Michael” while on a hitch-hiking pilgrimage from England to Jerusalem.
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Sep 11, 2024 | 
theimaginativeconservative.org | Dwight Longenecker
The romanticism in J.R.R. Tolkien’s great saga was inspired partly by the actions of King Jan Sobieski during the Battle of Vienna in 1683, when Christian Europe stemmed the advance of militant Islam. A minor observation in a recent essay began a series of connections that will please Catholics, conservatives, history hounds, and J.R.R. Tolkien fans. Carrie Gress was interviewing biographer Miltiades Varvounis for the National Catholic Register.
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Sep 10, 2024 | 
theimaginativeconservative.org | Dwight Longenecker
The same dynamic on display in Shakespeare’s “Othello” plays out within the human heart. There is an inner Iago who lies to us, and we want to believe that liar and believe that he is honest and loves us. Do we swallow his lies, or challenge his deception with the astringent face-splash of truth? The direction of my own writing at this time is towards fiction and drama, and so as to better enhance my own efforts I am re-reading the master—the Bard of Stratford.
