About Bradley J. Birzer

Bradley J. Birzer is the co-founder of, and Senior Contributor at, The Imaginative Conservative. He is the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in History at Hillsdale College and Fellow of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Dr. Birzer is author of In Defense of Andrew Jackson, Russell Kirk: American Conservative, American Cicero: The Life of Charles Carroll, Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-Earth, co-editor of The American Democrat and Other Political Writings by James Fenimore Cooper, and co-author of The American West.

The Christian Humanism of Steven Wilson’s “Hand. Cannot. Erase.”

By |2023-01-02T09:25:53-06:00December 19th, 2017|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Culture, Death, Music|

English musician Steven Wilson’s "Hand. Cannot. Erase" is extraordinary by the standards of any genre. His subject matter is the uniqueness of each human person, and he focuses on the life of one lost soul. An Incarnational Whole One of the greatest things in this whirligig of a world—however fraught with a string of perilous [...]

A True Conservative: Lee Edwards

By |2017-12-12T10:43:00-06:00December 12th, 2017|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Conservatism, History, Politics, Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley Jr.|

Lee Edwards has not just known the greats of post-World War II conservatism, but he has also lived with them, and as one of them… Celebrating his eighty-fifth year on this earth, Lee Edwards is a remarkable cultural treasure, a man’s man, a gentleman’s gentleman, and a conservative’s conservative. Biographer of Ronald Reagan and of [...]

Irving Babbitt vs. Progressivism

By |2021-04-28T10:22:28-05:00December 6th, 2017|Categories: American Founding, Bradley J. Birzer, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Culture, Liberal Arts, Philosophy, Progressivism|

Progressives lack imagination, and, in their desire to create a world made in their image, they can only mimic what they see with straight, sterile lines. When considering that Thomas Jefferson delivered his first inaugural address in 1801—perhaps the finest statement up to that point in history on the dignity of the Western and Socratic [...]

The American Nun Who Studied Under C.S. Lewis

By |2021-04-28T10:11:56-05:00November 25th, 2017|Categories: C.S. Lewis, Catholicism, Christian Humanism, Christianity, History, Literature, Poetry|

A renowned medievalist who did her post-doctoral work at Oxford under such luminaries as J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, Sister Madeleva Wolff wrote poetry as beautifully as she handled expertly all the chores of a Wisconsin farmer. “Accidents are so often God’s way of being doubly good to us” She is one of the most [...]

The Mysterious Origins of the Roman Republic

By |2020-04-20T21:41:13-05:00November 14th, 2017|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Civil Society, History, Plato, Rome, Western Odyssey Series|

Exactly how the Roman republic came into existence remains shrouded in mystery. Critically so. As with our tradition of English common law and the necessity of knowing that its origins are “beyond the memory of man,” from “time immemorial,” “ancient beyond memory or record,” and “time out of mind,” so it is with the best [...]

The Ciceronian Republic

By |2019-09-10T16:34:51-05:00November 9th, 2017|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Cicero, Culture, Socrates, Western Civilization, Western Odyssey Series|

Habits, mores, manners, and customs should prove more important in a republic than the law… “With Cicero fell the republic.”—Russell Kirk As one of my grand Hillsdale colleagues, Dr. Stephen Smith, once said to me, there has never been a serious reform or renaissance in Western Civilization since the fall of the Roman Republic without [...]

Cosmopolitanism and the Hellenistic World

By |2019-09-24T13:07:49-05:00November 2nd, 2017|Categories: Aristotle, Bradley J. Birzer, Christianity, Great Books, History, Philosophy, Plato, Socrates|

The desire to belong to something greater than one’s self is simply human, transcending time, place, and space. It’s as natural as our need to breathe. In this sense, Aristotle put it correctly when he noted that man is meant to live in community… When the polis of classical Greece collapsed brutally in the final [...]

God of the Hebrews

By |2018-11-21T14:41:35-06:00October 21st, 2017|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Catholicism, Christianity, History|

What matters most profoundly to the student of history is the revelations about God (sovereign), the created order (good), and humanity (fallen). If a person knows nothing but the first three chapters of Genesis, he will have, at least, a semblance of understanding of the human condition… While the ancient Hebrews were not the first [...]

My First Reading of “The Conservative Mind”

By |2021-05-10T19:02:35-05:00September 25th, 2017|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Conservatism, Libertarianism, Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind|

When I finished The Conservative Mind for the first time, I remember thinking quite clearly that Russell Kirk had gotten so close to truth, but, then, just when he had the chance, he failed to promote freedom—the proper answer to every single thing. I often look at, hold, and peruse my first (first to me, [...]

Irving Babbitt’s Higher Will

By |2021-04-27T21:24:14-05:00September 18th, 2017|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Christian Humanism, Conservatism, Featured, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, Religion, T.S. Eliot|

Irving Babbitt believed that man defined himself not by his rights, but by his duties, and particularly how willing he was to restrain his darker impulses and sacrifice himself for another… Famously, when Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt were debating one another while on a walk, the former, exasperated, asked: “Good God, man. Are [...]

Dismantling the Idea of the West

By |2021-05-03T14:56:29-05:00September 12th, 2017|Categories: American Founding, Bradley J. Birzer, Humanities, Liberal Arts, Philosophy, The Imaginative Conservative, Tradition, Western Civilization|

The dismantling of the idea of the West unwittingly wrought massive damage upon the very ways in which Western citizens viewed themselves, disconnecting them not only from other cultures and peoples but also from one another. The dismantling of the idea of the West began when medieval philosophers began re-introducing the Sophist notions reduced to [...]

What the West Has Given the World

By |2021-05-03T15:06:32-05:00September 5th, 2017|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Conservatism, Featured, Great Books, Philosophy, Plato, Western Civilization, Western Tradition|

While the West has made more than its share of mistakes, it has also done some things better than any other civilization, or, at the very least, introduced things to the world that the world then claimed for all of humanity. For those of us who still love Western civilization and consider ourselves loyal patriots [...]

When Men Became Human: Christopher Dawson’s 500 BC

By |2021-05-24T14:59:03-05:00August 30th, 2017|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Christopher Dawson, History, Natural Law, Philosophy|

Though Christopher Dawson remained unsure why the Natural Law developed, he did not hesitate to celebrate it. He remained firmly convinced that the development of Natural Law did not randomly emerge from individual genius, but rather believed that individual genius arose out of the various traditions and norms of each people. As a historian and [...]

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