The title of Gregory Wolfe’s excellent collection of essays, Beauty Will Save the World, is based on a much-quoted line from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. In its context it appears only in indirect speech, being attributed by one of the other characters to the “Idiot” of the title, Prince Myshkin. Thus in its original context its [...]
Russell Kirk All history, and especially modern history, is in some sense the account of the decline of community and the ruin consequent upon that loss. In this process, the rise of the modern State has been by far the most powerful influence. ‘The single most decisive influence upon Western social organization has [...]
On Empire, Liberty, and Reform: Speeches and Letters of Edmund Burke, ed. David Bromwich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). Empire and Community: Edmund Burke’s Writings and Speeches on International Relations, ed. David P. Fidler and Jennifer M. Welsh (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999). Edmund Burke was one of those rare figures who combined profound [...]
In one of the single most interesting moments during the constitutional convention of 1787, a discussion arose—really for the first time with any great seriousness—about the issue of slavery in the West. How the republic might expand would, of course, help define the republic itself. The admission of slaves was a most grating circumstance to [...]
Here are some words we did not hear from Sen. Barack Obama as he campaigned for the presidency back in 2008, as the Great Recession gathered: “Now, I won’t pretend the path I’m offering is quick or easy. I never have….[T]he truth is it will take more than a few years for us to solve [...]
(WARNING: Contains Neo-Conservatism and saucy language) Well, here’s a big buon giorno to our National Public Radio audience, because it’s time for Impariamo Opera and I’m your co-host, Angela Tedioso. And I’m Hans-Dieter Langweilig. But today we stray from the shores of sunny Italy to the magical, musical world of Strauss. […]
Clement calls for his readers to meet Jesus as the “Word” and “Educator” that “forcibly” compels people from the “worldly way of life and educates them to the only true salvation: faith in God.” The Educator is the one “who leads the way” to “improve the soul” not just in knowledge but to guide in [...]
To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man’s life. Few men have known better than he* how to give just place to the claims of the public and of the private life; few men have had better opportunity, few of those having the [...]
James Madison This election season, voters could do worse than remind themselves of the warning in James Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance”: “… take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of Citizens, and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. [...]
In the retrospect of forty years I can see my book, The Quest for Community (first published by Oxford University Press in 1953), as one of the harbingers of what would become by the end of the 1950s a full-fledged renascence of conservatism. There had been authentic and forthright individual conservatives before the 50s; among [...]
Is it not long past time to do a cost-benefit analysis of our involvement in the Middle and Near East? In this brief century alone, we have fought the two longest wars in our history there, put our full moral authority behind an “Arab Spring” that brought down allies in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, and [...]
Though it has been obvious to discerning observers for a considerable period that the United States is moving at an accelerating pace from constitutionalism toward arbitrary power, the vast majority of Americans have been slow to recognize that a crisis of governance exists. Much of the reason, I think, is that entire structures of understanding [...]
It’s been more than a bit of a Rush extravaganza for the last several months even in the mainstream media. The band is on tour right now, playing in venues as massive as they have for over thirty-five years. Drummer Neil Peart turned 60 last week. Relatively rare in progressive rock history, a novel has [...]
Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong. -1 Corinthians 16:13 Sobering voices tell us nowadays that the civilization in which we participate is not long for this world. Many countries have fallen under the domination of squalid oligarchs; other lands are reduced to anarchy. “Cultural revolution,” rejecting our patrimony [...]