Who remembers John Witherspoon? Although he was one of the most influential Americans of the eighteenth century, Witherspoon has been overlooked by subsequent generations of historian. John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic, by Jeffry H. Morrison (220 pages, University of Notre Dame Press, 2003) Who now remembers John Witherspoon? Despite his many [...]
The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things Are Written on the Sky by Russell Kirk. Although Dr. Kirk knows how hard the tempest of our time really rages, he has not fled or been driven to the heath like Lear or Lear’s fool. His insight is abundantly apparent in his new volume of lectures, which [...]
As the recent petitions to the White House confirm, secession is an idea that never goes away. The verb “secede” is derived from the Latin “secessio,” meaning any act of withdrawal. Originally introduced in the seventeenth century as a concept of ecclesiastical discourse and political theory, secession assumes the existence of the modern state, as [...]
Patricia Christine Jellicoe Christmastime is fast upon us, and for many Americans it is an opportunity for spirituality and merriment, family, tradition and fret. Especially fret. No sooner have Black Friday and Cyber Monday unleashed their discounts, no sooner have what John Willson calls the “walmartians” beamed down to smite one another over [...]
It has now been several weeks since we imaginative conservatives woke up to the nightmare that President Obama had been reelected. It is time we wake from our delusional daydream for a future conservative order. It’s time we realize it’s morning in America again and that we have been blind to the glaring truth that [...]
Among my many failings as a teacher is my refusal to indulge students’ persistent use of the word “democracy” to mean “all good things.” Particularly when I am teaching about constitutionalism and what a constitution is supposed to do, the constant refrain is that a constitution must establish, protect, further, or just “be” democratic. And [...]
Digory by Scott Dodge Flying on the back of Fledge (formerly known as Strawberry, the used up cab-pulling horse), on assignment from Aslan, over the newly-created land of Narnia, Digory said to Polly, “I wish we had someone to tell us what all those places are.” Polly responded, “I don’t suppose they’re anywhere [...]
There are currently 50 petitions for secession from the United States, one from each state, that have been registered with the federal government. It goes without saying that not one of them has any prospect of being acted upon. It is therefore tempting to dismiss these petitions as expressions of sour grapes on the part [...]
Nearly 30 years before he shocked National Review by endorsing Barack Obama for president, senior editor Jeffery Hart announced a divorce of a different kind from the American right. With “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to a Modern American Conservatism”—published in The New Right Papers in 1982 and previewed in NR a few months earlier—Hart split [...]
Peter Lawler on conservatism So David Brooks’s article is interesting more for its listing of various young conservatives than its actual content. I just don’t have time to comment much right now, but I thought I’d get it out there for your consideration. My talking points for now are pretty random: Pete Spiliakos [...]
Richard M. Gamble. In Search of the City on a Hill: The Making and Unmaking of an American Myth. The phrase “city on a hill” has become inextricably tied to Ronald Reagan. Some Americans may even think that Reagan, rather than Jesus, coined it. Reagan routinely spoke of America as that “shining” city (a descriptor Reagan [...]
As newly-reelected US President Barack Obama calls for bipartisanship to avoid the so-called “fiscal cliff,” a more possible example seems to be emerging in Middle Earth, where parties warring for eons are uniting against a common foe. “In the last 48 hours thousands of orcs and various daemons have pledged loyalty to the Common Front [...]
I mentioned in an essay last week that it had been eleven years exactly since I’d read my first book by Christopher Dawson. That book, 1942’s Judgment of the Nations, remains my favorite of Dawson’s works. I spent the entire Thanksgiving break that year, 2001, reading Dawson. I had found the book at Hyde Brothers Books [...]
“Nobody can make a tradition,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote; “it takes a century to make it.” There are American traditions, because there have been three centuries of American history; yet this is a brief period of time, when one remembers that some of the traditions of Europe and Asia and Africa have their roots in a [...]