Southern ways are held up to ridicule, and Southern virtues are out of fashion. But because Southerners think, believe, live and act within an inheritance, they enjoy a sense of confidence, faith and stability that may prove an invaluable asset as the foundations of our society begin to collapse. Late in August 1965, a young [...]
The South, Andrew Lytle feared, had been poor and virtuous for too long and now found the temptations of industry and commerce too alluring to resist. Material prosperity weakened family, community, and tradition and deprived rural southern life of its vitality, rendering it both tumultuous and desolate. Born in Mufreesboro, Tennessee on the day after [...]
In the Late Roman Empire, when classical civilization had fallen into decadence and decay, Christianity proved a dynamic and creative force. Amid the deterioration of political authority, the stagnation of economic life, and the decline of learning, a new civilization was emerging. I. As confidence in reason and the expectation of finding happiness in this [...]
During his final illness, Blaise Pascal often refused the care of his physician, saying: “Sickness is the natural state of Christians.” He believed that human beings had been created to suffer. Misery was the condition of life in this world. My uncle made book for a living. That is, he took money from those who [...]
By the fall of 1932, most Americans had come to perceive the depression differently than they had at its beginning. Growing numbers began to worry that depression, rather than being a temporary and purgative event, marked a permanent condition of material scarcity and economic stagnation. With fears mounting that the economy is about to slip [...]
Teaching at a time when civilization is in such obvious disarray and such marked decline imposes even more stringent and pressing obligations on the teacher. I have reached the conclusion that what American teachers must do is really very basic: Teach young men and women how to read and write, how to imagine beyond themselves, [...]
The Founding Fathers and their heirs wanted to establish and maintain a prosperous republic, yet they welcomed limitations on prosperity as much as they had welcomed restraints on power. This healthy respect for limits offers a way to recover the political and moral realism that contemporary Americans have lost. Somewhere I recall reading the poet [...]
Nikole Hannah-Jones is right and wrong. Although the first slaves arrived in Jamestown in 1619, the year and the event carry less significance than she imagines. Although neither deceptive nor careless, she is uninterested in facts in a conventional sense. Her principal objective is not to understand the past but to rebuke the present and, [...]
The West above all developed the capacity for self-reflection and self-criticism, acknowledging that what is, if wicked or decrepit, can be changed or replaced, and that what is not, however improbable or preposterous, can be brought into being. This recognition filled the world with a host of new possibilities. To many in the United States [...]
Automated and impersonal, American society, Andrew Lytle feared, was coming to be peopled by the rootless masses ensnared in dreary, routine, unimaginative, and irrelevant occupations—a society of interchangeable parts and interchangeable men. This condition was the very antithesis of the Christian economy. I. By the 1930s, Andrew Lytle thought the signs of impending disaster everywhere [...]
To study the past requires a sense of tragedy and perhaps a belief in original sin, “the imagination of disaster” as Henry James called it. The celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, our annual exercise in national amnesia and self-congratulation, by contrast, promotes the myth that “all’s well that ends well.” Only the most [...]
Andrew Nelson Lytle—novelist, dramatist, essayist, and professor of literature—extolled the order of the family, which by the 1930s he thought all but spent, precisely because it was rooted in the very concept of divine order that the modern world had decried and rejected. As patriarchy deteriorated, as acceptance of divine supremacy vanished, the family languished, [...]
Although Gnosticism has conditioned the American mind and dominated the American character, the United States itself, as we are once again discovering, is a historical, not a providential nation uniquely blessed of God. Nothing makes inevitable continued American prosperity or even American survival. What I write here is not my teaching, but my study; it [...]
If we do succeed in killing ourselves and destroying the world, then it will not matter who was right and who was wrong about science, the pandemic, climate change, or a host of other problems and afflictions. Our vicious quarrels, which at the moment so distort our perspective and seem so vital to our identity, [...]