That most overrated academic fop of the twentieth century, Peter Gay, spent a considerable amount of time and vitriol in the 1950s taking swipes at Russell Kirk, believing the duke of Mecosta a superficial romantic stuck in the past, fighting for the most worthless and transient of causes. In 1961, he finally wrote something of [...]
Mark Greaney understands this chaotic and violent world better than anyone currently in academia or, seemingly, in the media... True Faith and Allegiance: A Jack Ryan Novel (New York: G.P. Putnam, 2016) If I want to understand the things that transcend this world and inhere in all persons, I read Russell Kirk. If I want [...]
Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House revolves around three intrepid explorers who accept Professor Montague’s invitation to spend a summer living there, getting to know one another and getting to know—intimately—the workings of the house… Though she never made it past the young age of forty-eight, Shirley Jackson was known for two important things [...]
Whereas Adam Smith had warned that government must intervene in the economy from time to time, Edmund Burke believed any interference in the economy on the part of government to be a violation of the natural law… […]
Christianity, Edmund Burke held, is the great equalizer. Not only is it the first force in the world to recognize the moral equality of all men and women, but it allows the high and the low to become one in their equal desire for the good society… In a manner similar to Cicero with the [...]
That we remember the Articles of Confederation poorly has far more to do with the ultimate success of American nationalists than it does with actual failure or success of the Articles themselves. The Articles of Confederation have been denounced for so long that no one bothers to denounce them anymore. Almost every American and almost [...]
It would be difficult to find a modern writer who explores the notions of place better than does Stephen King—how a holy place might be made “haunted,” radiating the evil of Hell rather than the grace of God… Place matters. We Imaginative Conservatives especially believe this. Ever since God exiled Eve and Adam from paradise, we have longed [...]
At what other time of the year do families really come together in the way they do on Thanksgiving? I must admit, I always have mixed feelings about celebrating Thanksgiving. It’s not that I don’t love giving thanks—in fact, I really do love it. And, I especially love how we Americans do it. If I [...]
Post-war conservatism arose as a protest against the tapioca conformity of mass man and mass society. Any revival of conservatism will thus demand a recognition of true diversity and human dignity... For many Americans of my generation, conservatism represented the best hope for a truly diverse America, a country that valued individual persons against the [...]
Despite his own views on the matter of secession, Major Robert Anderson was full of vigor and fight in the immediate aftermath of the move of his troops into Fort Sumter. While President James Buchanan had received the news of Major Robert Anderson’s move to occupy Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, Anderson had his own [...]
Should one generation ever consider itself greater than any other generation, past or future, Edmund Burke warned in his magisterial Reflections on the Revolution in France, the entire fabric of a civilization might very well unravel and, ultimately, disintegrate. Our modern ears have no right to discount Burke’s argument as simple hyperbole. What takes centuries [...]
In what was, perhaps, Edmund Burke’s best writing, the Anglo-Irish statesman had argued in favor of the moral imagination, a way by which one sees the reflection of God’s glory in another. He then concluded that section of the Reflections on the Revolution in France by noting that “to make us love our country, our [...]
The Augustan Age refers to a time period broadly revolving around the restoration of order (if not necessarily liberty) at the end of the Roman republic and the beginning of the empire—roughly 50BC to 120AD. Many scholars label it the “Silver Age of Roman Literature.” Every one of the authors listed below held numerous qualms [...]
For those of us who love Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, and Irving Babbitt, the extravagantly convoluted term, “the moral imagination,” rolls readily off the tongue and warms the heart like few other things. Yet, most of our closest allies on the right scratch their collective and individual heads in confusion. “What is this moral imagination,” [...]