Unlike Russell Kirk’s better-known stories, “Off the Sand Road,” along with “Skyberia” and “Lost Lake,” are not tales of the supernatural, though there is a strong sense of the eerie about them. Together they form a trilogy of sorts, depicting the odd mix of wild rural beauty and slumbering menace that characterize the wild marches [...]
C.S. Lewis is recognized as a Christian lay apologist, a writer of children’s books, an adept novelist and fantasist, and a literary scholar and logician, still eliciting strong reactions, favorable or unfavorable, from his readers. On Friday, November 22, 1963, at about the same time as President John F. Kennedy prepared to enter the black [...]
According to Russell Kirk, the moral imagination is the power of knowing man, despite his weaknesses and sinful nature, as a moral being, meant for eternity. It recognizes that human beings, after all, are created in the image of God. Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology by W. Wesley McDonald (264 pages, University of Missouri, [...]
The Conservative Constitution by Russell Kirk A nation’s constitution can be created overnight, claimed Clinton Rossiter incautiously at a symposium over thirty years ago. Witness, he continued, the guiding instruments composed by several European countries shortly after each of the two world wars. Present at that same symposium, Russell Kirk answered Rossiter’s statement with a [...]
Thomas Jefferson: A Strange Case of Mistaken Identity by Alf J. Mapp, Jr. Reviewing selected letters of Edmund Burke in the American Spectator in 1985, Professor Charles R. Kesler claimed that American conservatives attempting to propagate Burke’s principles “have always faced an embarassing obstacle: namely the almost complete lack of a Burkean tradition in America.” [...]
Russell Kirk recognized that conservatism most closely honors the way men and women ought to act among their neighbors in community and in matters of transcendent faith. Rooted in the small community, conservatism is homely and humble, and it makes for respectful peace within families and among neighbors. It is brought about by example and [...]
On Friday, November 22, 1963, at about the same time as President John F. Kennedy prepared to enter the black limousine that would take him through downtown Dallas to his violent death, another life was coming to a far less dramatic close across the Atlantic in England. It was late afternoon in the village of [...]
J. R. R. Tolkien ’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-Earth by Bradley J. Birzer Much has been written of J.R.R. Tolkien’s accomplishment during the past half century, with critics struggling to understand the powerful grip exercised by the English fantasist’s writings upon readers. Some Tolkien-focused criticism has been enlightening, much has been repetitive, and a small [...]
Virtue and the Promise of Conservatism: The Legacy of Burke & Tocqueville, by Bruce Frohnen In his role as a professor of English literature, Thomas Howard sometimes gives his class a list of the following words: majesty, magnanimity, valor, courtesy, grace, chastity, virginity, nobility, splendor, ceremony, taboo, mystery, purity. The reaction he gets is quite [...]
In one of his syndicated columns published during the 1970s, the founder of The University Bookman famously wrote, “There is nothing more conservative than conservation.” Russell Kirk, considered one of the founders of post-war conservatism—that supposedly heartless, devil-catch-the-hindmost view of life that (again, supposedly) considers nature a nuisance to be tamed or destroyed—was a great admirer of [...]
Street Saints: Renewing America’s Cities by Barbara J. Elliott Some of the world’s greatest people are largely unknown, for they accomplish positive, life-changing deeds in quiet, unannounced ways. Their work is unreported and largely unknown outside their immediate circle of influence. A great number of such people lack political connections and every characteristic of celebrity, and [...]