A good friend of mine and a man I respect immensely, Hunter Baker, warned me to finish Isaacson’s long biography of Steve Jobs before passing too much judgment on the life and personality of the technology genius. Another close friend (a fellow Apple fanatic going back to the 1980s when we were debate colleagues and [...]
For those of us blessed enough to have visited Russell Kirk’s Piety Hill, we already know what charms have settled over the place, become one with the surrounding woods, the architecture, and the very home itself. Annette Kirk, that uncontainable force of nature, is, of course, the perfect hostess. And, who would not be enthralled [...]
Though neither a humanist nor a Christian—nor, for that matter, even a romantic in the vein of Blake who feared the “dark Satanic mills” of Industrial England—Mark Twain identified the late-nineteenth century fear of the machine run amok perfectly in his last novel, the tragically whimsical A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. One of [...]
I purchased Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs the moment it came out. I’ve read a number of books on the history of Apple and Jobs—some dealing with him directly and others only touching upon his life and ideas—and I was eager to see what the man who was asked by Jobs himself to write [...]
The Movement of World Revolution by Christopher Dawson (The Catholic University of America Press) Having witnessed the loss of an idyllic Edwardian world to the deadening trenches of the first world war, the rise of communism and the gulag state in Slavic Europe and China, and the advent of national socialism and the holocaust camps in [...]
Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson, by Bradley J. Birzer Featured Book: Since religion is the heart of culture, Dawson wrote, then “religion is the key to history;” therefore “[w]e cannot understand the inner form of a society unless we understand its religion.” To understand Europe and the West, then, [...]
From the Christian perspective, the Logos is the beginning, the middle, and the end of time and history, and history itself is a reflection of the Logos. Each person—from Adam to the last person—is a finite reflection of the Infinite, a bearer of the Image of God, an incarnate soul. In the stunningly poetic prologue [...]
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to review Lord Percy’s Heresy of Democracy, a book Russell Kirk considered essential for an understanding of conservatism in the 1950s. Another book he had in list that was more or less unfamiliar to me was Ross J.S. Hoffman’s The Spirit of Politics and the Future of [...]
Americans, as brothers and descendants of Englishmen, were entitled to the rights inherited from the English through the development of Anglo-Saxon common law and through the several political battles. On the eve of the American Revolution, most American thinkers had embraced the idea of all rights (and, therefore, sovereignty) being inherited.[1] Americans, as brothers and [...]
What better word might explain America in 1861 than that of word Homer used to begin The Iliad: Rage. But, rage for or against what? And, with what consequences? A century and a half later, we must recognize the whole period as rich with potential, rich with glory and . . . ripe for corruption. Noble [...]
Nicholas Berdyaev stressed the primacy of culture and theological issues over politics and economics as truer forms of reality. He argued that only when society has realigned itself, individual by individual and community by community, “towards divine objects” could humanity save itself. One kind of weird but enticing academic puzzle for me is discovering and [...]
William F. Buckley, Jr., Flying High: Remembering Barry Goldwater (Basic Books, 2008). Buckley’s book, Flying High, is much more a memoir of the conservative movement in the early 1960s than it is a biography of Goldwater. Indeed, without the subtitle and the book dust jacket bearing a picture of Goldwater campaigning in 1964, this might very well have [...]
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 [...]
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien edited by Humphrey Carpenter The History of The Lord of the Rings edited by Christopher Tolkien If considered at all, Oxford philologist and novelist J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) remains a perplexing twentieth-century figure for most academics, conservative or otherwise. Most famous academically for his insightful and seminal 1936 essay on Beowulf, [...]