The Imaginative Conservative

6 days ago | theimaginativeconservative.org | Joseph Pearce

Blessed Otto Neururer would be the first priest to be martyred by the Nazis but by no means the last. Caesar, like the poor, is always with us. So is Judas. And so are the disciples of Christ. The Tyrant, the Traitor, and the Martyr. These three types of men form the very threads from which the tapestry of history is woven.

1 week ago | theimaginativeconservative.org | Regis Martin

Why did St. Augustine write “The City of God”? Why should it continue to compel our attention today? It was the one project St. Augustine prized above all others and would spend fourteen years of his life putting it all together: The City of God. He finished the last of the twenty-two books in the year 426, just two years before the barbarians reached North Africa, laying siege to Hippo where he, its saintly bishop, would himself die two years later, in August of 430.

1 week ago | theimaginativeconservative.org | John Horvat

Faith must have its physical and visual expression. The return of the altar rail is a refreshing and sublime response to a distorted vision of the Church. It reintroduces the traditional teachings of the Church with awe and wonder, delighting the worshiper and resurrecting fervor for Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. In churches across the country, pastors are installing altar rails. Some parishes are bringing the rails back to old churches after they were torn out decades ago.

1 week ago | theimaginativeconservative.org | Joseph Pearce

Few remember Athelstan, Alfred’s grandson, who is neither lionized by the poets nor canonized by the Church. Yet he was a warrior king who is perhaps equal in greatness to Alfred and possibly rivals Edmund and Edward in piety. See you the windy levels spreadAbout the gates of Rye? O that was where the Northmen fled,When Alfred’s ships came by. -Rudyard Kipling, from “Puck’s Song”“The high tide!” King Alfred cried.

2 weeks ago | theimaginativeconservative.org | Regis Martin

The sheer impact of St. Augustine upon the life of the Church, of the emerging medieval world he had a hand in shaping, has never been equaled. Perhaps the first and most obvious thing to be said about St. Augustine, the span of whose life was close to eighty years—from A.D. 354 to 430—is that he was one of only a handful of truly foundational figures of the Christian West.