Liberalism “is now fading out of the world,” Russell Kirk proclaimed in 1955 in the liberal Catholic periodical Commonweal. “And I believe that the ephemeral character of the liberal movement is in consequence of the fact that liberalism’s mythical roots always were feeble, and now are nearly dead.” For Kirk, and many Christian Humanists of [...]
What are the ends of education? We mean, of course, the ends for us, for us democratic Americans. So we begin with the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America—Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. America, Tocqueville noticed, is an overwhelmingly middle-class country. To be middle class, of [...]
What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.—Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue MacIntyre’s brilliant critique of modernity and its many failings was published almost thirty years ago. Its many [...]
When it comes to the opinion of the people who matter, the Shakers are hip. They had all the correct views: They practiced sustainable agriculture and gender equality, and they even reduced their carbon footprint to almost zero. (There are said to be only three Shakers left in North America—that’s what celibacy will do for [...]
Socrates, who lived from 470 to 399 B.C., is separated from us by nearly two and one half millennia. This means that he had not in common with our progressive age the automobile, the aeroplane, the television, the computer, the telephone (whether cellular or regular), video games, virtual reality, etc. Can we, then, “relate” to [...]
Hillsdale College’s Professor of History Emeritus, Dr. John Willson, recounted briefly the scandal that befell Emory University historian Michael A. Bellesiles a decade ago. The latter wrote a book claiming that gun-ownership in Early America was greatly exaggerated and the U.S. “gun culture” only arose after the Civil War. But other historians found whopping errors that [...]
H. Lee Cheek The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things Are Written on the Sky, by Russell Kirk Wise Men is a collection of 11 lively essays by the wise old sage who was contemporary conservatism’s most able prophet. The Kirk neophyte will find these essays most alluring; it is unusual to experience such [...]
This evening, ladies and gentlemen, I conclude my lecture series with some desultory remarks on the possibility of redemption from error—and, in particular, whether our rising generation in these United States may find it possible to “redeem the time, redeem the dream”—to borrow T.S. Eliot’s line First, a few words about this concept “generation.” To [...]
Socrates was fond of repeating the advice of the Oracle: “Know thyself.” He probably said, “Know thyself,” rather than, “Know the world,” because it is more difficult to know oneself than to know the world. Self-introspection yields not ourselves, but something approaching infinity beyond ourselves. The first thing we know about ourselves is that we [...]