Last week, two of my Twitter friends (and friends of The Imaginative Conservative: @hencole and @Sir_Geechie) were happily discussing the 1965 Russell Kirk piece on Malcolm X; the one Winston graciously posted. After @henrole called it a birthday gift of sorts, @Sir_Geechie replied, “You know folks want narrative not knowledge.” I have found each of [...]
St. Rose of Lima One of my fondest memories—precious, to use the word properly—is of my great aunt Lonnie taking me to one of the oldest churches in Great Bend, Kansas. I was probably three or four, and we were alone in the church, early in the morning. I can’t remember exactly why [...]
A review of Lord Percy of Newcastle’s, The Heresy of Democracy: A Study in the History of Government (London, 1954). In 1957, Kirk published a list of “must-read” books to understand modern (meaning, as it had developed or been rediscovered in the 1950s) conservatism. His list would not surprise most readers of The Imaginative Conservative, [...]
What is man? What a simple question. Yet, no fully satisfactory answer has ever definitively been reached. At least by man. Over my previous three posts at The Imaginative Conservative, I have tried (whether successfully or not, is a different question) to take the idea of “conservative” back to its most fundamental principles: essentially looking at [...]
When we survey that last 100 years in even the most cursory manner possible, the one objective and rather obvious thing that holds the century together is both the attempt to deconstruct the human person and the counter effort to uphold his dignity. Contempt and defense, seemingly in a Manichaen-like struggle. While the Gulags, the [...]
I will admit, with only the slightest embarrassment, that the November elections depressed me mightily. As early as mid summer, I promised myself not to get worked up about the current state of politics. One candidate seemed frightful, and the other dreadfully dull. Neither vice presidential candidate did much for me, either, though a [...]
The other day, I had the occasion to look over some of my past essays at The Imaginative Conservative. Much to my surprise, I’m quickly approaching my 250th essay. I might actually have reached and passed this number. Because I’ve failed to label my essays correctly, I am probably over 250 essays. Officially, though, Google [...]
I mentioned in an essay last week that it had been eleven years exactly since I’d read my first book by Christopher Dawson. That book, 1942’s Judgment of the Nations, remains my favorite of Dawson’s works. I spent the entire Thanksgiving break that year, 2001, reading Dawson. I had found the book at Hyde Brothers Books [...]
Over the last decade and a half, as many readers of TIC have probably noted, I’ve had the blessed opportunity of researching and writing about Russell Kirk (1918-1994), generally agreed upon as the founder of post-war American conservatism. At first, I did this mostly as a hobby, having become intensely interested in Christian Humanism through [...]
Not Chesterbelloc, but Bur-Kirk. [Dedicated to the genius and patience of Winston Elliott] In the fall of 1950, Russell Kirk turned the ripe old age of 32. He had been publishing articles and reviews (and soon his M.A. thesis on John Randolph of Roanoke through the University of Chicago) since 1936. Even during [...]
Irving Babbitt, C. S. Lewis, Russell Kirk In a world agog with labels and categories we too often leave important ideas behind. With paleocons, traditionalists, neocons, Leocons, libertarians, classical liberals, anarcho-capitalists, distributists, and agrarians, the right can be as bad as the left in its fetish for classification. One group that defies easy [...]
One of the little known aspects of recent American history is that Russell Kirk served as one of Barry Goldwater’s most important intellectual advisors, 1959-1964. The two talked frequently, met frequently, and strategized frequently. In private and public, Goldwater acknowledged Kirk’s role a number of times. Only recently, however, did I discover that Kirk wrote [...]
The contrast in the ways historians John Patrick Diggins and Robert Griffith describe Eisenhower seems odd. How could the pictures of one president who served a half-century ago diametrically oppose each other? The answer lies in the fundamental difference in the way the two historians practice history. The Imaginative Conservative recently published Dr. John Willson's [...]
Eric, Gannon, and Nate Schlueter have graciously asked us to present our arguments on the relationship between capitalism and Christianity. The subtitle is something to the effect of “can a good Christian” embrace “the morality of capitalism.” Whether I should or not, I will interpret this question in my own way and attempt to answer [...]