Below is Part V in our video program “Conservatism and the Western Tradition.” This is the final segment in this discussion here at The Imaginative Conservative. (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV) Please visit The Imaginative Conservative YouTube Channel for this series and more. […]
Welcome to the Class of 2013 [this is a Convocation Address delivered in 2009 at St. John’s College, Ed.] and to your families. To the rest of our college community, welcome back. Welcome, friends all! I came to a rather startling realization over the summer as I was preparing to greet our newcomers: that I had returned [...]
This is adapted from my 1993 short book, John Witherspoon and the Presbyterian Constitution. It is intended to tell part of the story of the early American understanding of religious liberty, and to leave to the reader its bearing upon the current controversy, so utterly wrongly pictured by many as a “Catholic” issue or one [...]
According to John C. Calhoun, Thomas Jefferson served as the “Republican Patriarch,” the political thinker who had incorporated the republican understanding of liberty into a theory of federal relationships most conducive to the life of the community and political order. John Caldwell Calhoun inherited the social and political tradition of his South Atlantic world, confirmed [...]
For Russell Kirk ghost stories were not mere exercises in gore or terror without purpose. A gulag-and-gas-chamber-infested twentieth century provides demonic fright enough. With scary stories he sought to reawaken a sense of a greater reality, of a world that touches the physical, in an age smothered by materialism and the decay of traditional religion [...]
Below is Part IV in our video program “Conservatism and the Western Tradition” with Bradley J. Birzer and Winston Elliott, III. There are five segments of this discussion here at The Imaginative Conservative. (To watch the other parts in this series, click here for Part I, Part II, Part III, Part V) […]
John C. Calhoun Click here for Part I Put aside this literal biblical history. A man abstracted from a community and from history, Calhoun believed, in the vein of Aristotle, is not a man at all, but a mere animal. All men, Calhoun argued, are born into varying states of authority—the authority of [...]
John C. Calhoun Last weekend, I had the grand privilege of working with Emily Corwin, Adam Tate, and Richard Brake at a co-sponsored ISI/Liberty Fund colloquium in Philadelphia. Held at the gorgeous Omni, we overlooked Independence Hall. Our topic: Union, republic, and nullification. As I have been so many times in my adult [...]
Below is Part III in our video program “Conservatism and the Western Tradition,” with Dr. Brad Birzer. There are a total of five segments of this discussion here at The Imaginative Conservative. (Part I, Part II, Part IV, Part V) […]
The death of the spirit is the price of progress. Nietzsche revealed this mystery of the Western apocalypse when he announced that God was dead and that He had been murdered. This Gnostic murder is constantly committed by the men who sacrificed God to civilization. The more fervently all human energies are thrown into the [...]
I wish first to define the sense in which I shall use the term “man of letters.” I shall mean the writer for whom his writing is primarily an art, who is as much concerned with style as with content; the understanding of whose writings, therefore, depends as much upon appreciation of style as upon [...]
Russell Kirk The primary purpose of a liberal education, then, is the cultivation of the person’s own intellect and imagination, for the person’s own sake. It ought not to be forgotten, in this mass-age when the state aspires to be all-in-all, that genuine education is something higher than an instrument of public [...]
We seem to be haunted by the fear of our machinery and what it is doing to us, or what might happen when it goes wrong. According to landmarks of popular culture such as the Terminator and Matrix movies and Battlestar Galactica, sooner or later the machines will turn upon us. They will use us [...]
Hypocrite, n. One who, professing virtues that he does not respect, secures the advantage of seeming to be what he despises.–Ambrose Bierce I’ve wondered, from time to time, what parents may have been thinking to name a son “Rush.” A few of my New England ancestors adopted hortatory names–”Small-Hope Biggs,” “Safely-on-High Snatt,” or my favorite, as [...]