The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling, by Gertrude Himmelfarb. The Moral Imagination is a very engaging collection of a dozen essays on a dozen authors by a historian in the appreciative mode. Some pieces go back to the ’60s, some are recent, all are substantially revised even to the point of recantation. [...]
John Randolph of Roanoke: A Study in American Politics, by Russell Kirk. For Southerners of my antique persuasion, Russell Kirk’s John Randolph of Roanoke is a locus classicus. And for most American conservatives, it is a work of decisive importance, a path leading into a neglected portion of our common patrimony, a portion now not well [...]
British author Roger Lewis is adored by a small coterie of true conservative modernists and, it seems, despised by a much larger body of chatterati, mediacrats and the Leftist cultural mafia. Such polar reactions to this literary moralist, innovative biographer and wicked satirist explain much about the UK’s culture wars, so changed since the first [...]
What is the set of principles behind the government’s conduct of monetary policy? It’s a hard question to answer. The Constitution gives the United States the power “to coin money” and “regulate the value thereof” and to fix exchange rates with respect to foreign coin. But clearly, the Federal Reserve has moved far beyond this [...]
Just what is this classical patrimony received by the inhabitants of North America and consciously cherished well into the twentieth century? To Europeans living west of the Elbe or south of the Danube, the remains of classical civilization are visible still: intelligent observes are aware of a continuity extending over many generations. For that matter, [...]
Today I honor the men of the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 82nd Airborne Division of the U.S. Army who have sacrificed their lives while doing their duty. For them, and all of their comrades in arms, I ask God to bless them and keep them. To Lt. Winston Elliott IV, platoon leader in [...]
I had the privilege of transcribing Eliot’s famous essay, “Thoughts on Lambeth.” Below is a significant part of the essay (roughly 2/3 of it). I have edited it only down in size; I’ve not made any other changes. This is some of Eliot’s most revealing writing, especially regarding The Waste Land as a personal journey not [...]
When the April figures on unemployment were released May 4, they were more than disappointing. They were deeply disturbing. While the unemployment rate had fallen from 8.2 percent to 8.1 percent, 342,000 workers had stopped looking for work. They had just dropped out of the labor market. Only 63.6 percent of the U.S. working age [...]
…Stand up and keep your childishness: Read all the pedants’ screeds and strictures; But don’t believe in anything That can’t be told in coloured pictures. Chesterton would not have liked many of the stories told in coloured pictures by American comic books, which these days tend to dystopia and sado-eroticism—an all-too predictable reflection of the [...]
by Winston Elliott III & Darrin Moore Below is the first of three video segments of “The Permanent Things & Imaginative Conservatism”, the recent discussion of conservatism and the American Republic with host Darrin Moore & editor of The Imaginative Conservative, Winston Elliott, on WAAM Radio Talk1600 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. More to come… [...]
With this number I terminate my editorship of The Criterion. I have been considering this decision for about two years: but I did not wish to come to a conclusion precipitately, because I knew that my retirement would bring The Criterion to an end. During the autumn, however, the prospect of war had involved me [...]
The New Communitarians and the Crisis of Modern Liberalism, by Bruce Frohnen, Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1996. Community and Tradition: Conservative Perspectives on the American Experience, edited by George W. Carey and Bruce Frohnen, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998. Communitarianism at one level is a contemporary school of thought that takes to [...]
Brad Birzer’s article A New Dark Age mentioned the 410 sack of Rome by the Visigoths, the event that prompted St. Augustine to pen City of God. Brad’s article brought to mind the closing passage from one of my favorite works of history: by R.A. Lafferty “There is a term placed on everything, even the world. [...]
Constitutions are something more than lines written upon parchment. When a written constitution endures—and most written constitutions have not been long for this world—that document has been derived successfully from long-established customs, beliefs, statutes, and interests; it has reflected a political order already accepted, tacitly at least, by the dominant element among a people. True [...]