H. Lee Cheek In many regards, 2012 has been a troubling, nay, bewildering year. 2013 offers the possibility of a recovery and the renewal of our political tradition. Here are the books that I am giving as Christmas gifts. Kevin Gutzman’s James Madison and the Making of America (St. Martins, 2012), offers the [...]
A. E. Housman knew what he was talking about when he praised athletes dying young before they “wore their honours out” and had to watch their bodies age and the mementos of their former glory collecting dust on the mantle piece or window sill. Recently another Major League Baseball player, Carlos Ruiz, the talented and [...]
In a previous post I argued something I believe most traditional conservatives understand in their bones: we will not “take back” our culture and way of life, or even preserve room within which to lead lives of decency and virtue, through any grand political effort to construct a national political coalition. The assumptions and very characters of [...]
My six gift ideas are all recently published books, if only because I will always take books under the Christmas tree over socks, ties, and video games, no matter how trendy the latter might be. The Complete Thinker: The Marvelous Mind of G. K. Chesterton (Ignatius Press, 2012) by Dale Ahlquist. If there is a better [...]
What is man? What a simple question. Yet, no fully satisfactory answer has ever definitively been reached. At least by man. Over my previous three posts at The Imaginative Conservative, I have tried (whether successfully or not, is a different question) to take the idea of “conservative” back to its most fundamental principles: essentially looking at [...]
Can’t decide what to get for the imaginative conservatives on your Christmas list? Here area few things to feed the vita contemplativa. A membership in the Folio Society. The Folio Society publishes beautifully bound and illustrated editions of some of the world’s greatest books that make perfect gifts. Reading Cicero, Tolkien, Gibbon, C.S. Lewis, and [...]
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, by George Gissing The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home, by George Howe Colt To recommend a book is an ethical undertaking that reveals something about both the giver and the recipient. It is an act that says, “I believe you are a [...]
I have the following suggestions for people looking for imaginatively conservative gifts this Christmas. A national treasure, Bill Kauffman is almost single-handedly rewriting the history of the American Right. He is assuredly among the most interesting and entertaining conservative writers out there today. I recommend starting with Ain’t My America or his amazing biography of [...]
The Democrats, at their convention, stood so stridently for the rights of the liberated single woman that they offered the Republicans the opportunity to counter with a defense of the moral virtue of ordinary Americans devoted to God, family, country, and worthwhile work well done. Most Americans, it goes without saying, are repulsed by the [...]
The historian Michael Bellesiles tried to usher in the new millennium by claiming that guns were scarce in colonial America and even beyond. The problem was, it was quite easy to show that his research was flawed and his conclusions nonsensical. It wasn’t the first time that a historian with an agenda was found out, [...]
Christmas Spirit aside, there is (guilty) pleasure in offending the Enemies of The Permanent Things. Raise their blood-pressure by giving our kindred souls—or sporting yourself—a monocle, gray spats, a natty walking stick or a pocket-watch and chain. If that’s too daunting, start with a paisley cravat. Imaginative Conservative ladies may irritate the neo-barbarians by going to and from church or [...]
Here’s a sign that we see in front lawns all across Rome/Floyd County, GA: “Christmas is a Birthday!” And it is! Well, everyone knows that Jesus wasn’t really born on December 25. But there’s no particular reason that birthdays have to be exact. We’re not remembering the date, we’re remembering something unique, irreplaceable, something most [...]
F.A .Hayek Following the Second World War, Hayek tried in vain to warn Western capitalists that they had set themselves on the “road to serfdom” at the very moment when the West stood on the threshold of unprecedented economic affluence, which would have been impossible without the intervention of government. At the turn [...]
Five years of Prohibition have had, at least, this one benign effect: they have completely disposed of all the favorite arguments of the Prohibitionists. None of the great boons and usufructs that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. [...]