Below is Part II in our video program “Conservatism and the Western Tradition.” There are a total of five segments of this discussion here at The Imaginative Conservative. (Part I, Part III, Part IV, Part V) […]
Of the voluminous corpus of Russell Kirk’s writings, no small amount concerns the subject of education. Kirk counted in his memoirs that over a span of five decades he had authored “some hundreds of essays, articles, and newspaper columns,” as well as three books devoted to the subject. In particular, his fortnightly page in the [...]
Lynn Harold Hough The First World War and the Great Depression provided myriad challenges to the mission of the Methodist Church. As a nation began to doubt its role in the modern world, one of the country’s most dominant and politically-engaged religious denominations sought to respond to the chaos by reconsidering its own [...]
Deep political wisdom can be found in a writer who took very little interest in politics: C.S. Lewis, a scholar who achieved his greatest fame as a popular Christian writer. Lewis was sometimes laughably ignorant of current events. His friends were once amused to discover that he was under the impression that Tito, the Communist [...]
Paul Elmer More For, when everything is said, there could be no civilized society were it not that deep in our hearts, beneath all the turbulences of greed and vanity, abides the instinct of obedience to what is noble and of good repute. It awaits only the clear call from above–Aristocracy and Justice [...]
Below is a very brief introduction to our video program “Conservatism and the Western Tradition.” All five segments of this discussion are now posted here at The Imaginative Conservative. (Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V) […]
Eric Voegelin Eric Voegelin often is regarded as a major figure in 20th-century conservative thought—one of his concepts inspired what has been a popular catchphrase on the right for decades, “don’t immanentize the eschaton”—but he rejected ideological labels. In his youth, in Vienna, he attended the famous Mises Circle seminars, where he developed [...]
In an article in the February 13, 2012 TIME magazine, “The Conservative Identity Crisis,” the author says that “modern conservatism was born in the early 1950s” when “a young writer named Russell Kirk unearthed a rich philosophical tradition going back to British writer and politician, Edmund Burke; Kirk's 1953 book, The Conservative Mind was a [...]
The recent furore over the publication by a reputable medical ethics journal of an article arguing that infanticide should be permitted because there is no moral difference between an embryo and a newborn, and the other fuss about the discovery that women in the UK are regularly given abortions on the NHS simply because they [...]
It seems everybody is looking for better answers to today’s problems; we want a revelation. But the problem is; we are reluctant to accept the superior answers and revelations which have already been ratified by the entire human experience. Although there are no shortcuts to wisdom, in this Information Age, the House of Wisdom is [...]
A true natural aristocracy is not a separate interest in the state, or separable from it. It is an essential integrant part of any large body rightly constituted. It is formed out of a class of legitimate presumptions, which, taken as generalities, must be admitted for actual truths. To be bred in a place of [...]
A wonderfully witty commentary on the State of Education. We hope you will join us in The Imaginative Conservative community. The Imaginative Conservativeis an on-line journal for those who seek the True, the Good and the Beautiful. We address culture, liberal learning, politics, political economy, literature, the arts and the American Republic in the tradition of Russell Kirk, T.S. [...]
Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists; A Conservative Manifesto, by Peter Huber The Greening of Conservative America, by John R.E. Bliese. These two books set out to correct the general public perception that conservatism and environmentalism are at odds. Peter Huber’s book goes even further. His manifesto argues that modern liberal environmentalism is fraudulent. [...]
As Sigmund Freud never said, the great unanswered question is: “What do conservatives want?” You must confess that it is a genuine question, because the characteristic conservative stance for the past two centuries has been one of opposition. We are more clear, and unified, about what we oppose than by what we propose. Stephen Holmes, in his [...]