Our own life’s journey, like Dante’s, is fraught with temptations and trials. We modern pilgrims should exercise the gifts of free will, reason, and a capacity for love in such a way that our choices lead us ever closer to the source of all Love and away from those occasions, near or far, that would [...]
The kinship between the Nashville Agrarians and Whittaker Chambers is seen in three main ways: the farming life itself, the concept of private property, and the religious dimension of human existence. Beyond the similarities and differences between them, Chambers emerges as a singular figure who, more so than the Nashville group, provides a model for [...]
If for M.E. Bradford, Abraham Lincoln was a gnostic renegade and heretic beyond the pale, he was for Richard Weaver a political and rhetorical father figure with whom one might argue but never condemn. These Southerners’ differing critiques of Lincoln’s person, views, and actions cast some light on this complex figure, one who continues to [...]
For some time I had puzzled over a discrepancy or inconsistency between two of Richard Weaver’s essays which treat of Lincoln to one degree or another. In his “Abraham Lincoln and the Argument from Definition” (1953), Weaver praises Lincoln as a “conservative” by virtue of his employment of the argument from definition on such issues [...]
It may be justly said that the past, if it is to live, must live in us; the corollary is that if it does not, then we perforce participate, to one degree or another, in a kind of living death. This is the heart of Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” Then Lytle asked: [...]