“The Heart of Culture” traces the success of Western education, rooted in the very nature of Western civilization as a historical “clash and combination” of Greek culture and Judeo-Christian religion. It is the perfect book for parents, teachers, and administrators who are dissatisfied with modern education but don’t know why. The Heart of Culture: A [...]
It’s that time again. Another year is wending its way to a close and we’re all preoccupied with preparations for Christmas. This being so, I thought I’d offer my personal selection of books, published in 2019, which I feel would make good gifts for those imaginative conservatives in our lives. […]
The series of battles that took place in the Vendée have been almost entirely excluded from any recounting of the Revolution. Why? The rising in the Vendée paints a darker picture of the evils that Revolutionists did to those citizens, most of them peasants, who would not adopt the principles of the Revolution. Something about the [...]
We can hope that Robert Hugh Benson, an author so long neglected, will once more be seen among the stars of the literary firmament, his own star once more in the ascendant. Robert Hugh Benson was one of the brightest lights in the Catholic literary firmament in the early years of the twentieth century, his [...]
Of all Russell Kirk’s books, Enemies of the Permanent Things has the oddest history. Its origins were in the Darcy Lectures that Kirk delivered at Alabama College in 1958. Over the eleven years until its final publication, it evolved significantly, reflecting the evolution of Kirk’s own ideas, especially regarding T.S. Eliot. First appearing in print [...]
You would not know it from the discussion on campus or in our high schools, but the best analysis of the American War for Independence was provided while it was still unfolding. The character of the Americans, the designs of the British Parliament, and the policies that brought these two into conflict were brilliantly analyzed [...]
Physicists talk of two of the fundamental forces of nature as the strong and the weak forces. I am going to borrow these terms in an entirely metaphorical way to name the two fundamental forces in which I live my life as a professor of literature. The strong force is technology, not to be understood [...]
Stephen Greenblatt’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Swerve: How The World Became Modern is a narrative in search of a story. The narrative is a simple and familiar one: the world became modern when the forces of reason, enlightenment, and human dignity replaced the benighted and repressive superstitions and hypocritical hierarchies of medieval Christendom. This emancipation [...]