The Miraculous Journey by Damien Hirst Here we are, in the Fall (that’s Autumn to us Brits, but what’s in a name?): that season full of mists and mellow fruitfulness. This time twenty-eight years ago I was walking around with a pumpkin shaped belly, waiting for the arrival of my first baby. Now [...]
At the beginning of the third volume of Evelyn Waugh’s masterful World War II trilogy, Sword of Honor, Guy Crouchback, a British Catholic officer entering a disillusioned middle age, has a conversation with his elderly father in which he disparages the Lateran Treaty. Gervase Crouchback rebukes his son’s irascibility. “My dear boy,” he said, “you’re [...]
I encourage you, my son, to be a conservative but not in the narrowly political sense. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats embody the fullness of true conservatism, and I have no desire here to give you partisan advice. I want to draw you to something deeper, a way of life that is grounded in [...]
“Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,” said Secretary of State Henry Stimson of his 1929 decision to shut down “The Black Chamber” that decoded the secret messages of foreign powers. “This means war!” said FDR, after reading the intercepted instructions from Tokyo to its diplomats the night of Dec. 6, 1941. Roosevelt’s secretary of [...]
And if we should know what government is, we should observe, in Thucydides' laconic account of the revolution at Corcyra, what happens when it fails.– Stringfellow Barr Most keen observers would say that our government has been in failure mode for a number of decades, and this is not easily refuted on empirical grounds. Readers of [...]
Education and the Permanent Things If we are going to transmit the permanent things, we will have to put back into education the moral and metaphysical vision that is foundational to Western education and Western civilization. I hope to illustrate this thesis by discussing Russell Kirk’s vision of conservatism and the permanent things, by describing [...]
For decades, now, the universe of constitutional interpretation has been divided into “textualists,” who argue that the document must be read according to the reasonable meaning of its words, and those who argue for a “living” constitution, the meaning of which can “grow” over time to “meet the needs of a changing people and nation.” [...]
Today the idea that the cultivation of manners should be an essential part of one’s education has been nearly lost. Indeed, evidence of the demise of manners is all around us, and thus we should be well aware that one of the main pillars of civilization is crumbling. On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. [...]
Had I the Wings: The Friendship of Bachman & Audubon, by Jay Shuler Jay Shuler’s Had I the Wings is unusual in that it focuses not on an individual or an event, but on a friendship. Together, with the assistance of their families, John Bachman and John Audubon produced two of the seminal works of [...]
Ronald Reagan and Russell Kirk (This is one of a series The Imaginative Conservative is publishing in honor of the sixtieth anniversary of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. Essays in the series may be found here.) President Barack Obama’s decisive electoral victory last November caused panic in some conservative circles. Questions about the continuing relevance [...]
Photo by Felipe Vanancio Eric Voegelin (1901-85) is often portrayed as one of the severest critics of modernity–its belief in human reason’s ability to understand and convey the fundamental structures of reality and its dismissal of transcendent teleologies as private and suspect beliefs. For Voegelin, modernity was a “Gnostic revolt” against reality: the [...]
Recent liberal successes, such as the ongoing redefinition of marriage to include same-sex relationships, dramatize the failure of social conservatism in public discussion. What is most striking to conservatives about the situation is the conviction among intelligent and influential people that conservative social views are altogether baseless, so that adherence to them is an intellectual [...]
Seeking for the roots of order, we are led to four cities: Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and London. In Washington or New York or Chicago or Los Angeles today, the order which Americans experience is derived from the experience of those four old cities. If our souls are disordered, we fall into abnormality, unable to control [...]
Conservatism prospered in the half-century following the Second World War, but following wide-spread rejection at the polls, substantial policy defeats, and ever-souring popularity, the time has come for conservatives to reexamine and reaffirm their first principles. In this year, which celebrates the sixtieth anniversary of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, conservatism faces an identity crisis [...]